ABSTRACT
Video is a voluminous, redundant, and time-sequential medium whose overall content can not be captured at a glance. The voluminous and sequential nature of video programs not only creates congestion in computer systems and communication networks, but also causes bottlenecks in human information comprehension because humans have a limited information processing speed. In the past decade, great efforts have been made to relieve the computer and communication congestion problems. However, in the whole video content creation, processing, storage, delivery, and utilization loop, the human bottleneck problem has long been neglected. Without technologies enabling fast and effective content overviews, browsing through video collections and finding desired video programs from a long list of search results will remain arduous and painful tasks.
