Advances in compression techniques, decreasing cost of storage, and high-speed transmission have facilitated the way video is created, stored and distributed. As a consequence, video is now being used in many application areas. The increase in the amount of video data deployed and used in today's applications not only caused video to draw more attention as a multimedia data type, but also led to the requirement of efficient management of video data. Management of video data paved the way for new research areas, such as indexing and retrieval of videos with respect to their spatio-temporal, visual and semantic contents. In this paper, semantic content of video is studied, where video metadata, activities, actions and objects of interest are considered within the context of video semantic content. A data model is proposed to model video semantic content, which is extracted from video data by a video annotation tool. The work in this paper constitutes a part of a video database system to provide support for semantic queries.

In this paper a video data model that allows efficient and effective representation and querying of spatio-temporal properties of objects is presented. The data model is focused on the semantic content of video streams. Objects, events, activities performed by objects are main interests of the model. The model supports fuzzy spatial queries including querying spatial relationships between objects and querying the trajectories of objects. The model is flexible enough to define new spatial relationship types between objects without changing the basic data model. A prototype of the proposed model has been implemented. The prototype allows various spatio-temporal queries along with the fuzzy ones and it is prone to implement compound queries without major changes in the data model.

Abstract – Canvass, or Customized Access to News Video Archive Storage System, is a proofof concept prototype video composition system that allows users to retrieve automaticallycomposed video stories based on input selection criteria. Composition is achieved at the shot level. In essence, users are provided with a set of news stories that are composed, on-the-fly, from available news content, considering their individual needs. We envision this concept to be applicable to future personalized video delivery systems as video storage and delivery systems become more ubiquitous. This report describes the priciples of operation and architecture for Canvass.