Excalibur Technologies of Vienna, Virginia, specialist in search and retrieval software, has licensed a new video search technology to Sony Corp in Japan, which could see the arrival of consumer VCRs and camcorders that let the user carry out searches of video content without having to view the whole film. Called Video Analysis Engine, the technology is due to be announced at Internet World next week. The Engine is a software developer’s kit that uses adaptive pattern-recognition technology to analyze streaming, live, analog or digital video and detect events and scene changes in the video. The engine is not aimed specifically at the consumer market, however. Its likely to be mainly used by entertainment and media broadcasting companies in the first instance, whose lifeblood is video, according to Excalibur. One of the next steps for Excalibur could be to provide the Engine for CA’s Jasmine multimedia database to enable users to search and retrieve video content. Excalibur director of marketing, Mark Demers, said the company is not in discussions with CA to do this at present. In the past month, however, Excalibur has made available a class library for Jasmine so that Jasmine application developers can build text and image search capabilities. Core beta testers for the engine are the members of the Video Advisory Council, which is made up of media companies that is advising Excalibur on how to apply the video search technology to enable companies to manage of video-based assets effectively. Sony Marketing (Japan) Inc and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television network are two named members of the seven or so that make up the Council. Excalibur is now in the process of signing up five others to help with development of the second version of the product.
