The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Online video content has grown enormously, such that it is a huge proportion of newly-created content. There are an estimated four billion different video links available to consumers for watching online. YouTube users alone are currently uploading about half a million videos a day. The leading mobile platforms iOS, Android and Windows are provided with ever larger phone screens for convenient video viewing, and even more so are the various tablets such as the iPad. Furthermore, the industry has only just begun the competition over the online TV experience (e.g. Google TV, Xbox Live), together with all its companion apps (e.g. Xfinity).

In this new era of video-content explosion the need to organize all of the world's videos for optimal discovery and viewing dictates that cutting-edge visual recognition technologies be applied. For scalability, it is impractical to spend more than a couple of milliseconds processing a single video frame. Videosurf (of which I am chief technology officer) is a silicon valley company recently sold to Microsoft that has tackled some of these issues. In this talk I will describe a few of the video analysis techniques that Videosurf has developed to facilitate discovery and viewing of online video content.