Media Content Management

Abstract

The production of multimedia content has grown overwhelmingly in recent years due to decreasing hardware costs, inexpensive storage and ubiquitous high-bandwidth networks. In addition, the introduction of digital video is completely changing the landscape of the entire video value chain. The easy access and increased availability of multimedia is posing new challenges to manage the data. Image and video archives in broadcast studios, corporate archives of multimedia collaborative sessions, video conferencing sessions and educational videos all require tools for quickly locating video segments of desired content with transparent access. The market for such tools, known as media asset-management tools, has been growing rapidly. In this chapter we will discuss the general architecture and the tools for media content management. We will survey some of the techniques that employ methods of data management beyond traditional databases. We will discuss existing research prototypes and some commercially available systems. These systems enable applications that facilitate effective access, interaction, browsing and display of complex and inhomogeneous information consisting of images, video and audio.