Object tracking and hypermedia links creation in MPEG-2 digital video sequences

The work presented in this paper describes a tool for object tracking and notes insertion and information retrieval to be applied to MPEG-2 sequences. Maximum compliance with the MPEG standard is sought, in that the added information is transmitted as side information without affecting the actual video-audio stream that can be decoded by a standard MPEG-2 decoder. Additional processing is added to a standard encoder only with the scope to allow the automatic tracking of one object across a different Group of Pictures which would be otherwise unrelated. Results show that the proposed algorithm is capable of tracking objects with a good degree of precision for about 100 frames. Features are included to allow the identification of objects even after occlusions, provided that some (reasonable) restrictions are met