The color browser: a content driven linear video browsing tool

The proliferation of multimedia information sources and the availability of large capacity consumer storage devices, raise the need to present video in compact forms so that users can effectively access interesting parts to watch. Aiming at an implementation in consumer electronics products and targeting to non-IT-expert users, an innovative user-friendly tool for video browsing and retrieval has been developed. The color browser enhances conventional slide-bars by embodying information about the video content in its colored background. It exploits low level features, like the dominant colors or the volume of the sound-track, automatically extracted from the digital video streams to allow intuitive access and content-driven navigation through unstructured video sequences.