Nicta pledges video search in 2-3 years

Beverley Head
Thursday, 24 February 2011 09:09

Business IT - Technology

Within two to three years a team of researchers at Nicta, working in association with Microsoft Research Asia, intends to have captured a video database of at least 100 Terabytes which will allow videos to be searched and surveillance cameras tracked in near real time to identify and locate particular human actions.

Instead of having to fast forward through old football videos looking for a particular goal, it would be possible to search a term such as 'goalkeeper dive' and be automatically directed to that section of the video.

The opportunity to also monitor surveillance cameras in near real time offers significant defence and security opportunities. But first Nicta needs to scale up its database of captured and analysed human actions.

Dr Jian Zhang, principal researcher and project leader, outlined the research programme at Nicta's Techfest in Sydney this week which showcased some of the organisation's leading research projects. The relationship with Microsoft was unveiled earlier this month, and will involve PhD students securing Microsoft scholarships to spend three months at a time in Microsoft labs overseas.

Citing Cisco research which has found that 31 per cent of internet traffic today is video , a figure tipped to rise to more than 50 per cent by next year, Dr Zhang said it was important that tools were developed making video search more effective.

By capturing video of ordinary human actions - such as people running or chatting - it was possible to develop algorithms to describe that action and then use these algorithms to search other video for similar actions. The project began 18 months ago and to date has captured just a couple of terabytes worth of actions so far - to be useful Dr Zhang said at least 100 terabytes would be required.

Besides Microsoft Research Asia, Nicta has forged links with the European group PetaMedia which is working on peer to peer tagged media in order to allow better use of online multimedia.