The Informedia: News-on-Demand
Library Creation Process

News-on-Demand is only one of several Informedia Digital Video Library prototypes. Unlike other Informedia prototypes [4,5] which are designed to be testbeds for educational uses of the system, News-on-Demand focuses on finding rapid and fully automatic methods for the creation of an indexed digital video library. The educational content of the other Informedia prototypes allows time for careful computer-assisted human editing, but the short-lived nature of broadcast news requires completely automatic library creation and update for News-on-Demand.

The following steps are performed through scripts and programs, most of them relying on simple heuristics:

1. Digitize the video data
2. Create a time-aligned transcript (from closed-captioning or speech recognition)
3. Segment story boundaries
4. Do image segmentation of scene breaks and key frames
5. Index stories
6. Download index to client.