Zodiac: An Interactive Video Authoring
Environment
Motivation:
Build a powerful video authoring tool that can explore history
tree easily and have scene, shot detection functionality, and provide vidio
annotations
Group Members:
Research Projects
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Multimedia File System (MMFS): MMFS extends the UNIX File System
(UFS) to support interactive multimedia applications. MMFS supports a two-dimensional
file structure for single-medium editing and multiple-media playback environments.
The API allows the communication of application-specific information to
MMFS for performance optimization. MMFS significantly improves interactive
playback performance by supporting intelligent prefetching and state-based
caching, prioritized real-time disk scheduling, and synchronized multi-stream
retrieval. In addition to improved response time for VCR-like playback
modes, the MMFS optimizations lead to minimal synchronization skew during
multi-stream retrievals, and orders-of-magnitude reduction in response
time for editing operations, when compared to UFS. The current effort is
to extend MMFS to a network environment and integrate it into the Stony
Brook Video Server
.
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History-Based Video Authoring and Video Annotation: Easy-to-use
audio/video authoring tools play a crucial role in moving multimedia programs
from research curiosity to main-stream applications. This paper describes
the design and implementation of an interactive video authoring system
called Zodiac, which employs an innovative edit history abstraction
to support several unique editing features not found in existing commercial
and research video editing systems.
Zodiac provides users a conceptually
clean and semantically powerful branching history model of edit
operations to organize the authoring process, and to navigate among the
design alternatives. In addition, by analyzing the edit history,
Zodiac
is able to reliably detect a composed stream's shot and scene boundaries,
which facilitate interactive video browsing.
Zodiac also features
a video object annotation capability that allows users to associate
annotations to moving objects in a video sequence. The annotations themselves
could be text, image, audio, or video.
Zodiac is built on top of
MMFS, a file system specifically designed for interactive multimedia development
environments, and implements an internal buffer manager that supports transparent
lossless compression/decompression. Shot/scene detection, video object
annotation, and buffer management all exploit the edit history information
for performance optimization.
Publications
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T. N. Niranjan, Tzi-cker Chiueh, Gerhard A. Schloss,
"Implementation
and Evaluation of a Multimedia File System," in IEEE International
Conference on Multimedia Computing Systems, Ontario, Canada, July 1997.
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Tzi-cker Chiueh, Tulika Mitra, Anindya Neogi, Chuan-Kai Yang,
"Zodiac:
A History-Based Interactive Video Authoring System," in Proceedings
of ACM Multimedia '98, Bristol, England, September 1998.
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Tulika Mitra, Chuan-Kai Yang, Tzi-cker Chiueh,
"Application-Specific
File Prefetching for Multimedia Programs," in IEEE Multimedia '00,
New York City, July, 2000.
Related links
Acknowledgement
This project is sponsored a Student Research grant from USENIX.