Video Content Search Gets a Boost - Technology Review

"A new online video search tool launched this week makes it easier to search the content of video lectures by automatically transcribing words used in the lecturer's visual aids. TalkMiner was created by researchers at Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL), in California, to help students and professionals search the ever-expanding online archives of video lectures and presentations. "It gives you a good shot at finding something that wasn't mentioned in the title or abstract but is buried deep inside the video," says Larry Rowe, president of FXPAL. Video lectures are becoming an increasingly popular study tool, and more and more universities are providing them, says Rowe. But if you're a student trying to review part of a lecture for a midterm exam, or a professional searching for something specific in an online TED lecture, the process isn't quick. Even if you know the date a lecture was given, there's no way to search it for specific content without watching the entire thing, says Rowe. TalkMiner overcomes this by skimming videos to find the speakers' presentation slides. It analyzes the footage once per second for telltale signs of a presentation slide, such as its shape and static nature; captures the slide image and compensates for any skewed angles; and uses optical character recognition (OCR) to detect the words on the slides. These words are then indexed into TalkMiner's search engine, which currently makes available 15,000 videos from institutions such as Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and TED. "OCR and the search indexing have been done before," says Rowe. What's new is automatic extraction of slide content from video...."