A May 2004: Image and Video Browser over the Web

 

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The objective of this project is to build a "photo album" or "image gallery" viewable over the web. Although it is relatively easy to generate a simple static browser of an image database, this project is more challenging.

The Image Browser is expected to be screen-aware (ie utilise the full physical screen of the user), band-width aware (ie, decrease resolution for slow connections and pre-load/cache the images which are likely to be viewed next), dynamic (so that results from an image search engine can be viewed), context-aware (so that annotations, if any, can be displayed along with the images). We have several pure image collections of up to 32,000 images which are partially annotated. There exist backend image search engines which can be integrated into the browsing process.

Video Browsing should initially be the same as image browsing, ie, one can expect that a video has been dissected into "shots" each of which is represented by a key-frame image. When one clicks on a key-frame, the clip should be played in this window. We have some 100 hours of videos dissected into shots and key-frames with annotations from speech recognition or teletext subtitles for these collections.