A VRML Approach to Web Video Browsing

Huge amounts of digital video information appear on the Web. Browsing becomes a predominant issue since i) the result lists to be expected from video search engines on the Web are likely to be even less accurate than the ones we endure today in search of HTML pages; ii) the time for inspecting a single URL is expected to be even more time-consuming since we have to view time-based information i.e. viewing-over-time is the standard way of inspection; iii) the bandwidth wasted by viewing non-pertinent information tends to be by orders of magnitude larger than for HTML text. We present an approach to fast visual perception of video contents. Our flexible hierarchical 3D representation is based on an automatic ranking and colour evaluation scheme. Our Java implementation generates a set of dynamic VRML2 scenes which can be viewed using VRML2 browsers available for virtually every platform. The ranking is calculated in the compressed domain (MPEG) which results in very high performance for the video indexing portion of the system