An open framework for video content analysis

In the past few years, the amount of the internet video has grown rapidly, and it has become a major market. Efficient video indexing and retrieval, therefore, is now an important research and system-design issue. Reliable extraction of metadata from video as indexes is one major step toward efficient video management. There are numerous video types, and theoretically, everybody can define his/her own video types. The nature of video can be so different that we may end up, for each video type, having a dedicated video analysis module, which is in itself nontrivial to implement. We believe an open video analysis framework should help when one needs to process various types of videos. In the paper, we propose an open video analysis framework where the video analysis modules are developed and deployed as plug-ins. In addition to plug-in management, it provides a runtime environment with standard libraries and proprietary rule-based automaton modules to facilitate the plug-in development. A prototype has been implemented and proved with some experimental plug-ins.