Intel Developing Video Search Technology

In a quest to make computing more interactive, Intel said it is working on video search technology that it hopes to bring to its future multimedia platforms. This video search technology, which is being developed at Intel labs in U.S. and China, cuts down videos frame-by-frame and then uses image and face recognition technology to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. The frames are then patched together to make video search possible.

For example, users will be able to search videos of football games to zoom into moments when their favorite players score, said Lin Chao, a researcher with Intel. The technology recognizes and categorizes a player's face and objects like a goalpost and ball using algorithms and statistical processing technology that Intel has developed.

Once a user requests to see the goal, the technology looks for frames that contain related objects and delivers the video to the user. Users can zoom into specific moments without watching entire videos, Chao said. The technology's recognition capabilities also help categorize images by person and object, which saves users from typing keywords to tag photographs.

However, the technology has challenges that can be overcome as processing power increases, Chao said. Processing a video to make it searchable takes hours, as current processing on PCs is limited. Chao couldn't predict when the technology would reach consumers.

The technology is part of Intel's "visual computing," which combines multiple cores, software development platforms and graphics capabilities to enable a more human interaction with a PC, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel during a keynote at Intel's research show in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday. Intel wants to use the visual computing platform to enable interaction with a PC in life-like 3-D environments or to analyze video instantly.

By , PCWorld