Section: Application Domains

Content-aware video applications

The amount of video footage is constantly increasing due to the dissemination of video cameras, the broadcasting of tv programs by multiple means, the seamless acquisition of personal videos,...The exploitation of video material, whatever its usage, requires automatic (or at least semi-automatic) tools to process video contents. A wide range of applications can be envisaged dealing with editing, analyzing, annotating, browsing and authoring video contents. Video indexing and retrieval for audio-visual archives is, for instance, a major application, which is receiving lot of attention. Other needs include the creation of enriched videos, the design of interactive video systems, the generation of video summaries, and the development of re-purposing frameworks (specifically, for 3g mobile phones and Web applications). For most of all these applications, tools for segmenting videos, detecting events or recognizing actions are usually required.

We are mainly interested in the processing of videos which are shot (and broadcast) in the audiovisual domain, more specifically, sports videos but also tv shows or dance videos. Amateur videos of similar content can also be within our concern. On one hand, sports videos raise difficult issues, since the acquisition process is weakly controlled and content exhibits high complexity, diversity and variability. On the other hand, motion is tightly related to sports semantics. Besides, the exploitation of sports videos forms an obvious business target. We have developed several methods and tools in that context addressing issues such as shot change detection, camera motion estimation and characterization, object tracking, motion modeling and recognition, event detection, video summarization. Beside this main domain of applications, we are also investigating gesture analysis problems. An on-going project in particular aims at monitoring automatically car drivers' attention.