Contact:	Bob Nelson						For immediate release
		(212) 854-5573					June 5, 1997
		rjn2@columbia.edu



Columbia Software Retrieves, Edits
Images and Videos on the Internet

	Shih-Fu Chang, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Columbia 
University, and his research team have created software that can search the 
Internet for images or videos and then edit them, part of a new generation of 
software that will allow users to create their own multimedia productions.
	Graphic artists, journal editors, news professionals or anyone who keeps 
large files of images or videos will be able to search their archives, or the World 
Wide Web, by content.  The software will also help students and teachers derive 
new curriculum activities from the Web's global trove of information.
	One of Professor Chang's new programs, WebSEEk, begins by downloading 
files found by trolling the Web.  It then attempts to locate file names containing 
acronyms, such as GIF or MPEG, that designate graphics or video content.  It 
also looks for words in file names and associated tags that might identify the 
subject material.
	Users can enter words describing the image they seek, or they can sketch 
an image, assign color, texture or motion to it, and ask the software to match it. 
 A magazine editor looking for a picture of a black cat to illustrate a Halloween 
layout could type the words "black cat" into the program, or find pictures of cats 
under an "animals" heading in the system's picture classification, or could draw 
a likeness of a cat and color it black.
	When the software finds an image, it analyzes the prevalence of different 
colors and where they are located.  Using this information, it can distinguish 
among photographs, graphics and black-and-white or gray images.  WebSEEk
also compresses each picture so it can be represented as an icon for display with 
other icons.  For a video, it will extract key frames that begin new scenes.
	So far, WebSEEk has downloaded and indexed more than 650,000 pictures 
and 10,000 videos from tens of thousands of Web sites.  The material has been 
automatically classified into a taxonomic structure for browsing, with more than 
2,000 divisions, such as architecture, arts, nature and people.  Professor Chang is 
continuing to refine the program, which will become far more powerful with the 
eventual adoption of the MPEG-7 standard, which will allow producers of 
multimedia to attach information about its content.
	Professor Chang's VisualSEEk system gives users the option of sketching 
and coloring in shapes corresponding to the image they are looking for.  With his
 VideoQ software, users can add motion trajectories to find video clips containing 
motions in a certain direction, such as a high jumper clearing the high bar or a 
racing car spinning out of control.
	Another program, WebClip, is an editing tool for digital video, and can be 
used either on a local hard disk or on the Internet, bypassing expensive video 
editing facilities.  Professor Chang's software performs editing functions in 
compressed computer code, permitting rapid turnover since the video images do 
not need to be fully decoded until they are viewed.  Roving correspondents could 
record scenes with a digital videocamera - such as the Omnicamera - and then 
edit the material before sending it for broadcast.
	Professor Chang has also developed technology to add a digital watermark 
to video sequences.  The watermark consists of a string of digital ones and zeroes 
embedded in the digital video, and can be either visible, to prevent re-use of the 
material, or invisible.  The coding could help news editors authenticate images 
they receive from field producers, or could add copyright information.
	Software that accesses digital video in various ways will become vastly more 
flexible with the adoption of MPEG-7, a comprehensive content description 
standard.  Information describing the content of a multimedia file will be 
attached to the file in a way that any search engine can find.  The attached 
information could be at any level of abstraction, from language to computer code, 
and is sometimes referred to as "the bits about the bits." 
	One objective of MPEG-7 is to enhance interoperability among different
image or video archives, most of which use proprietary content description 
schemes.  Information in a standardized format attached to multimedia files 
might tell researchers when a video was recorded or give the names of artists who 
wrote accompanying music or contributed in some other way.  It could also 
include codes to index primitive visual attributes, such as shapes, colors, and 
motions, of video objects contained in the images or videos.
	Professor Chang is among the researchers developing the new MPEG-7 
standard, which according to an international timetable is to be implemented in 
the year 2000.  Users will be able to specify keywords or preliminary visual 
information to search engines, which will then rely on the MPEG-7 content 
attached to files to conduct fast and efficient multimedia searches.
	The National Science Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, the NEC 
Research Institute, IBM, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Columbia's Strategic Research 
Initiative and sponsors of Columbia's ADVENT forum supported the research.
	Professor Chang's image search and edit team includes graduate students 
John R. Smith, for WebSEEk; Horace Meng, for WebClip; and William Chen, Hari 
Sundaram and Di Zhong, for VideoQ.
	Visit his site at http://www.ctr.columbia.edu/advent/demos.html.

This document is available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/pr/.  Working press may receive
 science and technology press releases via e-mail by sending a message to rjn2@columbia.edu.

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