VideoZoom Spatio-Temporal Video Browser

We describe a system for browsing and interactively retrieving video over the Internet at multiple spatial and temporal resolutions. The VideoZoom system enables users to start with coarse, low-resolution views of the sequences and selectively zoom-in in space and time. VideoZoom decomposes the video sequences into a hierarchy of view elements, which are retrieved in a progressive fashion. The client browser incrementally builds the views by retrieving, caching, and assembling the view elements, as needed. By integrating browsing and retrieval into a single progressive retrieval paradigm, VideoZoom provides a new and useful system for accessing video over the Internet. VideoZoom is suitable for digital video libraries and a number of other applications in which streaming methods provide insufficient quality of video, video downloading introduces large latencies, and generating video summaries is difficult or not well integrated with video retrieval tasks.