Universal MPEG content access using compressed-domain system stream editing techniques

An MPEG system layer compressed-domain editing technique is proposed to facilitate the delivery and integration of multiple segments of MPEG files, residing on remote databases. Various multimedia applications, including retrieval and summarization, split MPEG files into small segments along shot boundaries and store them separately. This traditional method requires extra management and storage payload, provides only fixed segmentations, and may not be play smoothly. In order to solve this problem, our MPEG system-domain editing tool directly extracts video-audio information from the original MPEG sources and combines them to generate a single MPEG file. Manipulated wholly in the system bitstream domain, this method does not require decoding, re-encoding, and re-synchronization of audio and video data. Thus, it operates in real-time and provides great flexibility. This composite MPEG file can be transmitted and displayed through general Web interfaces. The proposed method is applied to our video retrieval, video summarization, and video editing systems, and has shown its great advantages.