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

Principal Investigator: Tzi-cker Chiueh

Group Members:

• Tulika Mitra (mitra@cs.sunysb.edu)
• Anindya Neogi (neogi@cs.sunysb.edu)
• Chuan-Kai Yang (ckyang@cs.sunysb.edu)

Research Projects

• 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 .

 
• 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

• 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.
• 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.
• Tulika Mitra, Chuan-Kai Yang, Tzi-cker Chiueh, "Application-Specific File Prefetching for Multimedia Programs," in IEEE Multimedia '00, New York City, July, 2000.

• Anindya Neogi's "Active Video" page:  http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/~anindya/avs/avs.html

Acknowledgement