With all the hubbub about video use online these days, a topic that’s starting to creep into the conversation is video search.

To date, most search capabilities for video have been associated with its metadata information (filename, keywords, tags, or associated commentary). For example, if you are trying to find a specific scene such as a “crowded urban sidewalk” and typed that in to Google Video, YouTube, or any other site, it’s not necessarily searching the video itself, it’s searching these bits of associated text.

Glimmers of the future are starting to spark to life:

• Blinkx is probably the most consumer-friendly version of the capability that is out there so far. It’s a heck of a system hog, but has indexed some of the stock video that’s out there. It uses face and voice recognition. Try it out on George W. Bush.
• Riya has still search capability. For example, you can search within its objects category for phone and it spits out results of images that show a phone.
• PodZinger is another that is promoting itself as a good way to search within PodCasts, but has video capability as well.
• Finally, Virage has been providing a system that autogenerates metadata information. Most of its work has been for defense contractors and private security applications so far.

What does this mean for media pros? Well, if you’re cutting a VNR and need to search for video of a particular scene, you may be able to get more accurate results in less time.

The technology will also help once downloadable or on-demand video takes off and you’re looking for a specific object or event in a particular scene. You’ll quickly be able to, say, search for “boat explosion” in “The Usual Suspects” and get that result immediately without having to navigate menus and scene chapters.

Right now, it probably doesn’t make much sense. Once an abundance of high quality metadata gets created, however, you can count of its benefits becoming clear very quickly.

Google won’t be left behind as all this takes shape. It recently acquired Neven Vision and is working to integrate that technology into Picasa.

BusinessWeek had an interesting article that touched on the subject if you’re looking for some additional context.

You may also be interested in Don Dodge’s commentary on the subject (specifically debating Riya).

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 9:28 am and is filed under Interactive, Media, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.