Multimedia is bursting out all over, and Japan is right in there pitching. Hitachi Ltd has developed an automatic high-speed retrieval technique for video pictures, which is designed to run on a workstation. This development builds on technology that came out of a research project sponsored by the Ministry of International Trade & Industry, Friend 21. The technology enables the reading-in of video pictures as digital data into the computer, high-speed analysis, and then retrieval and editing of the stored frames. Hitachi says it has already done a lot of work on the application of image recognition techniques, including the development of a method of automatic Table of Contents generation, which uses the detection of changes in colour distribution to distinguish different frames, thus making possible the automatic analysis of camera work. The prototype system consists of a workstation with video input equipment (laser disk, video tape and broadcast tape); it was demonstrated at Interchi ’93 International Conference on Computer Human Interfaces in Amsterdam, Holland.
