Section: Application Domains

Video database management

The existing video databases are generally little digitized. The progressive migration to digital television should quickly change this point. As a matter of fact, the French TV channel TF1 switched to an entirely digitized production, the cameras remaining the only analogical spot. Treatment, assembly and diffusion are digital. In addition, domestic digital decoders can, from now on, be equipped with hard disks allowing a storage initially modest, of ten hours of video, but larger in the long term, of a thousand of hours.

One can distinguish two types of digital files: private and professional files. On one hand, the files of private individuals include recordings of broadcasted programs and films recorded using digital camcorders. It is unlikely that users will rigorously manage such collections; thus, there is a need for tools to help the user: Automatic creation of summaries and synopses to allow finding information easily or to have within few minutes a general idea of a program. Even if the service is rustic, it is initially evaluated according to the added value brought to a system (video tape recorder, decoder), must remain not very expensive, but will benefit from a large diffusion.

On the other hand, these are professional files: TV channel archives, cineclubs, producers... These files are of a much larger size, but benefit from the attentive care of professionals of documentation and archiving. In this field, the systems can be much more expensive and are judged according to the profits of productivity and the assistance which they bring to archivists, journalists and users.

A crucial problem for many professionals is the need to produce documents in many formats for various terminals from the same raw material without multiplying the editing costs. The aim of such a repurposing is for example to produce a DVD, a web site or an alert service by mobile phone from a TV program at the minimum cost. The basic idea is to describe the documents in such a way that they can be easily manipulated and reconfigured easily.