Video Object Retrieval by Trajectory and Appearance

The prevalence of video recording capability, either on surveillance systems or mobile devices, has contributed to the popularity of video data. As a result, video management has become relatively more important than before and, in particular, video retrieval has been one of the main issues in this regard. Traditional video retrieval systems take texts as the inputs to look for similar information from the title, annotation or embedded textual data of a video, in a way that is very similar to the keyword search adopted by a common search engine. However, the lack of visual information specification during a search often makes the result rather inaccurate or even useless. For this reason, video retrieval systems using images or videos as the inputs have also been proposed; nevertheless, the associated ambiguity and complexity have made the implementation of such systems relatively difficult and, therefore, those systems are not as successful as desired. To address this, in this paper, we propose to perform a video retrieval of a desired object through the inputs of its trajectory and/or appearance, together with the help of a 3-D graphical user interface for more intuitive interactions, so that more satisfactory results can be achieved. We firmly believe that such a framework could serve as the foundation for behavior analysis used in many surveillance systems.