Indexing of compressed video: Methods, challenges, applications

With the fastly developing standards for video compression, the availability of the video content at a large scale in the compressed form has become an everyday reality. Compressed video streams whatever is the compression standard contain primary information which without full decompression of the content can serve for its indexing and retrieval. This primary features optimized for the compression purposes are very often noisy and subject to compression artefacts. Hence their re-use for analysis and indexing purposes remains a challenge. In this paper we present the methodology which starting from the early low - resolution standards of MPEG family up to the new high-quality-high definition video compression approaches aims at answering the same question: how to re-use noisy primary features for fast and efficient video indexing.