On Fast Microscopic Browsing of MPEG Compressed Video

MPEG has been established as a compression standard for efficient storage and transmission of digital video. However, users are only limited to VCR-like (and tedious) functionalities when viewing MPEG video. The usefulness of MPEG video is presently limited by the lack of tools available for fast browsing, manipulation and processing of MPEG video.
In this paper, we first address the problem of rapid access to individual shots and frames in MPEG video. We built upon the compressed video processing framework proposed in \cite{yeo-thesis}, and propose new and fast algorithms based on an adaptive mixture of approximation techniques for extracting spatially reduced image sequence of {\em uniform\/} quality from MPEG video across different frame types and also under different motion activities in the scenes. The algorithms execute faster than realtime on a Pentium personal computer. We demonstrate how the reduced images facilitate fast and convenient shot and frame-level video browsing and access, shot level editing and annotation, without the need for frequent decompression of MPEG video. We further propose methods for reducing the auxiliary data size associated with the reduced images through exploitation of {\em spatial\/} and {\em temporal\/} redundancy. We also address how the reduced images lead to computationally efficient algorithms for video analysis based on intra and inter shot processing for video database and browsing applications. The algorithms, tools for browsing and techniques for video processing presented in this paper have been used by many in IBM Research on more than 30 hours of MPEG-1 video for video browsing and analysis, and found to be indispensable.