Cooperative content analysis agents for online multimedia indexing and filtering

New integrated services are emerging from the rapid technological advances in networking, multi-agents, media and broadcasting technologies. This advancement allows for large amounts of multimedia information to be distributed and shared on the Internet. To fulfill the goal of the efficient searching and effective redistribution of online multimedia, automatic segmentation, efficient content analysis and effective semantic concept interpretation of visual data are required. In this research, we propose a system with cooperative content analysis agents for automatic video analysis to support fast online multimedia indexing and filtering. An independent metadata channel is also proposed as the communication mechanism among the content agents. The proposed system is evaluated and applied to CNN news distribution and sharing over the Mbone Multicast.