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Toshiba's Powerful Authoring Tool Delivers Moving Images Extracted from Motion Pictures to Web Sites
TOKYO, July 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Toshiba Corporation today announced that it
has developed authoring software that gives web page designers, content
developers and presentation makers the ability to quickly and easily extract
irregularly shaped objects from motion pictures and deliver it to a web site
as an MPEG-4 video. Current systems for extracting non-rectangular objects from moving
pictures -- a walking person or a flying bird, for example -- are complex and
difficult.
They require extensive training and know-how, and the whole
process takes time.
Toshiba's new software is much less demanding on the user
and allows objects to be extracted in about the tenth of the time taken by
present software systems.
Once extracted, objects can be encoded to MPEG-4
video and displayed on Web browsers equipped with a required plug-in.
The new
system opens the way to the fast authoring and delivery of more attractive
multimedia content over the Internet. The high hurdle in object extraction is the precise indication of the
boundaries of the object -- the point where an eagle ends and the sky it is
flying through begins.
Achieving this has required time-consuming
frame-by-frame indication, as automatic extraction was too imprecise.
Toshiba
has achieved high precision automated extraction, and saves the objects as
MPEG-4 video, which supports high compression rate encoding of arbitrarily
shaped objects. Toshiba's software consists of authoring and rendering packages.
The
authoring software imports video files, extracts desired objects and saves
them as MPEG-4 video files.
These files are stored on web servers with other
content files.
Manual operation is confined to indicating the rough boundary
of the object in the first frame.
In successive frames, the indication is
done automatically.
In a process known as ``Robust Estimation'' the software
first analyzes spatial local motion between frames and then the motion of the
object, based on the local motion.
This gives rough estimates of the position
and shape of the object.
Precise boundaries are determined by the fractal
method for quantifying change.
This method achieves faster extraction and
with greater precision than any other method. The rendering software that displays the MPEG-4 video object in html files
is viewed with Web browsers.
Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator
versions of the plug-in are supported.
Users experience the object as another
integrated part of the web site being visited. Toshiba is now developing a business plan for promoting the new package in
the marketplace.
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