Informedia: News-on-Demand is an application developed within Carnegie Mellon University's Informedia Digital Video Library Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Defense's Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) as part of the Digital Library Initiative. The Informedia Project [2] is creating a digital library of text, images, videos and audio data available for full content retrieval. Through the integration of technologies from the fields of natural language understanding, image processing, speech recognition and video compression, the Informedia System [3,8] allows a user to explore multimedia data through interactive queries.
The Informedia system for video libraries goes far beyond the current paradigm of "video-on-demand", in which a user can select from one of a limited set of videos and view that video after a potential delay of a few minutes. The user remains a passive observer of material produced by someone else and the computer adds no benefit to this video-on-demand model over having a stand-alone VCR with each video on a tape. By contrast, the Informedia system segments hours of video into logical pieces and indexes these pieces according to their raw content (dialog, images, narration). Users actively explore the information by finding pieces of interest to their search, rather than following someone else's path through the material (as in professionally produced educational CD-ROMs), or viewing a big chunk of pre-produced material (video on demand). Through the dynamic exploration supported by a deep, rich library and the indexing/retrieval capabilities of the computer, the user is more motivated and potentially learns more from the data set.
While Informedia: News-on-Demand is centered around processing news stories from various broadcast sources, the News-on-Demand system is one example of the Informedia approach to make any video, audio or text data accessible. The same methods can be used to index and search other streamed multimedia data by content.
For an overview of the Informedia Vision, take a look at the
MPEG "vision video" Informedia:THE VISION
(Beware: size is 103 699 646 bytes).