Intelligent Browsing for Multimedia Applications

• Venue: ICMCS '96 Proceedings of the 1996 International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems
• Year: 1996

This paper describes a technique, we term intelligent browsing; the software built upon this technique assists the users in their search through a multimedia database. Searching for an item of interest in a large multimedia database is a complex task even for users who have knowledge about it. An active (intelligent) browser suggests to the user items it estimates to be close to the target of the search. The intelligent part of the active browser consists of a learning module whose object of ``study'' is the profile of the users' search actions. After a target is detected the intelligent browser brings on the screen in a dedicated window the item or items of interest and controls the synchronization of the audio, video, or written components of the item. If confirmed by the user, the dedicated window is transformed in a series of windows allocated to the desired item. The novel aspect of intelligent browsing is that it is entirely unobtrusive: it infers its similarity measure from the user's normal browsing actions, without any special input. Use of the browser on a multimedia application is illustrated in this paper}.