“Accessing Information from Digital Video Libraries”

Abstract: The development of techniques to support efficient and effective navigation through large databases of digital video information is receiving an increasing amount of attention from researchers in recent times. This arises for numerous reasons including the availability of large amounts of video from TV, movies, CCTV, and other sources, and the development and availability of sufficient computational power and storage in personal computers and mobile devices to manage personal video. Video navigation itself has challenges in many related areas including automatic video analysis and feature identification, interfaces for capturing user needs, interfaces for browsing and searching, information retrieval on temporal, visual media, automatic video summarization, and the development of standards for encoding video description. Each of these on their own represent huge areas of research, which occupy the attention of many researchers, but combining all these diverse interests together to address the problems of video navigation, is itself a challenge.

About the Speaker: Alan Smeaton is a full Professor of Computing at Dublin City University where he is Director of the Centre for Digital Video Processing and leads the Multimedia Information Retrieval Research Group. He is Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences since 1998 and was Head of the School of Computer Applications from January 1999 to December 2001. He holds the B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the National University of Ireland. His early research interests covered the application of natural language processing techniques to information retrieval (text) but this has broadened to cover the indexing and content-based retrieval of information in all media, text, image, audio (spoken) and especially digital video. At present his major research funding is in the area of indexing and retrieval of digital video and in Digital Libraries, and has also received funded research in music IR and in web searching.