VIZARD introduces a new intuitive concept to deal with video content. The software supports users in order to create a sketch or a story they want to tell. Rather than be constrained by having to follow simple timeline representations, editors are able to manipulate the inner structure of a digital video. This is realized by visualizing a video like a book in sentences, paragraphs and chapters. VIZARD consists of three main components: the VExplorer, the VPublisher, and the VAnnotator. Furthermore a special library supports basic editing operations in the compressed domain for the formats MPEG-2.
VExplorer
The VExplorer provides the user with a comprehensive "video collection search, organization and management" tool for organizing local content and in order to pre structure material in a repository. The most important feature of the VExplorer is to provide the user with logical views on the local archive on any kind of data (e.g. video, audio, text, images, programs, etc.). These views can be customized as hierarchically structure-able collections representing temporal orders. Next to this the VExplorer enables the user to draft a story or a sketch by selecting and structuring material. During this phase the user can take advantage of the powerful search mechanisms provided by the VExplorer. Searching for content can be either done on similarity (query by image) or by searching annotations created with the VAnnotator. The entire repository containing the stories can be persistently stored in XML format. Single items or entire sub-trees can be directly imported into the VPublisher in order to be further refined and manipulated.
VPublisher
The VPublisher is a new-generation storyboard, video editing and video publishing tool. With the VPublisher, the user has the possibility to manipulate the inner structure of a video document we call Video Book, with the result that the publishing of personalized video content is as easy as writing a text document. The basic idea of the VPublisher is to move away from a simple time line representation as it is currently used in commercially available video editing systems. We provide an overall visualization of the object structure by generic layout elements.
VAnnotator
The VAnnotator provides a flexible and intuitive way for annotating video material. This tool uses the concept of video lenses for providing different views on the materials being annotated. There are lenses for viewing and adding textual annotations and lenses that allow viewing the result of image processing algorithms such as cut detection. The tool follows a timeline paradigm, where each track can have several annotations. All the annotation data is based on the MPEG-7 standard and the output format is also compatible with MPEG-7.