What is a Video Search Engine? Part III – Detecting Motion

In Part I and II, we examined how we would be able to search Speech and Text inside videos. In Part III, we will look at one of the first names given to videos – “Motion” Picture. 

So, all videos have motion? That may not be true, not all videos have motion (or movement) all the time, especially in the case of security and surveillance videos.

video-search-engine-motion-detection.jpg

Detecting motion in videos enables you to efficiently identify sections of interest within an otherwise long and uneventful video. That might sound simple with a single video, but what if you have 10,000 hours of videos to review every night? That’s a near impossible task to eyeball every video minute.

Motion detection can be used on static camera footage to identify sections of the video where motion occurs.

  • Detect when motion has occurred in videos with stationery backgrounds
  • Eliminate false positives caused because of light changes, shadows, small insects, and others

While there are motion sensors that can detect motion real-time, these systems tend to be expensive. Thus, the reason why most of the CCTV surveillance systems only does recording at best. Therefore, there are many scenarios that does not require real-time motion detection, like detecting a car entering a bus lane during peak hours.

video search engine bus lane detection

Current technology has come to a point where it is able to differentiate between real motion (such as a person walking into a room), and false positives (such as leaves in the wind, along with shadow or light changes). This allows you to generate security alerts from camera feeds without being spammed with endless irrelevant events, while being able to extract moments of interest from extremely long surveillance videos.

To find out more about how you can detect motion inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.

What is a Video Search Engine? Part II – Searching Text

In Part I, we found out that there are 7099 living languages in the world. That includes both written and spoken only languages. According to Ethnologue (20th edition) out of that 7,099 living languages, 3,866 have a developed writing system.

Which leads us to this second part of our series – Searching Text inside a video. Besides Speech, Text is probably the second most important element where we can extract data from.

For example, in a presentation or talk given by a speaker. Besides speech, the speaker would augment the session with a set of slides. Therefore, besides his voice, text (in the slides) is another set of data that can be captured. This is important because what he says and what he present in the slides can be vastly different.

Text that can be OCRed during a presentation

Text that can be OCRed during a presentation

The technology to capture these text inside the video is called Video OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Video OCR is derived from OCR, a technology that has been around a long time.

By strict definition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (source: Wikipedia). The first OCR machine that read characters and converted them into standard telegraph code was invented by Emanuel Goldberg in 1914!

Unfortunately, one hundred years on, OCR technology still has some ways to go, especially in the field of adding more language capabilities and recognizing handwriting. However, with more A.I. and Machine Learning, the hope is that researchers can add more capabilities to what OCR can do now.

However, Video OCR is giving OCR a new lease of life by simply adding another dimension – moving images. Given the amount of videos that has never been OCRed before and the amount of videos being generated every day, the potential for Video OCR is immerse.

To find out more about how you can search TEXT inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.

What is a Video Search Engine? Part I - Searching Speech

Of all formats, videos are the most difficult to search. Typically, current search engines can only search for "Title" and "Metadata" of the videos, which are manually keyed in by a human. There is no way to search the content inside the video. For example, how do you find a specific piece of news in a news clip? Or specific words that appear inside a video? How can you find them without actually watching the videos yourself?

Before we even get into the question of what is a video search engine, we need to have an understanding what can we search inside a video? Elements can include Speech, Words (or Text), Motion, Emotions, Faces and Objects.

VideoSpace Video Search Engine

To kick of this “What is a Video Search Engine?” series, let’s tackle the most obvious of the elements – Speech.

In an hour, a person can say up to 9,000 words. Given the rate of videos are being produced today, that’s a lot of words. According to The Ethnologue catalogue of world languages, there are currently 7099 living languages. Obviously, Speech Recognition technology has not been able to keep with these vast number of languages. However, the good news is (depending on you see things), just 23 languages account for more than half of the world’s population.

Languages in the World (Source: www.ethnologue.com)

Languages in the World (Source: www.ethnologue.com)

On the technical aspect of searching speech in videos, the following process is required: 

  1. Transcribe (Speech-to-Text) – transcribing speech in the video
  2. Index - make the speech searchable
  3. Search - brings the users to exactly where the search terms are in the video.

The processes involved might sound simple, but the process of transcribing speech is filled with problems. There are factors that can affect the accuracy of speech recognition. For example:

  • heavy localized accent
  • low speech volume
  • bad diction
  • heavy background noise
  • multiple voices speaking at the same time

With the above in consideration, there are a lot of videos that are “not suitable” for machine transcribing: movies, TV shows, anything with mixed audio and sound effects, poorly recorded content with background noise (hiss).

To find out more about how you can search speech inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.

Video Platform from a DevOps prespective - Babbobox CTO, Sabrina Lim at CloudExpo Asia 2017

Babbobox CTO, Sabrina Lim (yes.. she's a female CTO), will be speaking at CloudExpo Asia - DevOps Live at 12.05pm on 12 Oct.

Babbobox CTO Sabrina Lim

Essentially, she'll be speaking about a combination technologies covering Media, Search, A.I., Cognitive and unstructured data (all the stuff that we are using) from the DevOps perspective. So yes... it'll be a bit geeky and techie!

So if you are at the show, do drop by and say hi!

UK, US... Here we come! Catch us at Microsoft Tech Summit Birmingham and Washington, DC!

Time to get out there and show the world our Babbobox Search Engine

We are excited to be in invited to participate in the exclusive Microsoft Tech Summit. As part of our expansion plan, we have decided take part on the events in Birmingham (UK) and Washington DC (US).

Here are the dates and venue details:

tech_summit_birmingham

Birmingham, UK

Date: January 24-25, 2018
Venue: National Exhibition Centre (NEC) Birmingham B40 1NT United Kingdom
URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/techsummit/birmingham

tech_summit_washingtondc

Washington, DC, USA

Date: March 5-6, 2018
Venue: Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20004
URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/techsummit/washington-dc

If you are in town then, do drop by and say hi! Watch this space for further Tech Summit updates!

#babbobox #videospace #videosearchengine #microsoft

Microsoft recognizes Babbobox as key global partner for Media Services

We are delighted to be listed as a key Microsoft global partner for Azure Media Services on http://amslabs.azurewebsites.net/. (Please scroll down)

babbobox video search engine

This is in recognition of Babbobox's pioneering Unified Search Engine and Video-Search-as-a-Service where both services are World's First. 

"We are honoured to be invited by Microsoft to be part of this exclusive club of partners." said Alex Chan, Babbobox's CEO, "Considering Babbobox is still a relatively new entrant in comparison to other partners, to be invited into this elite group shows that Microsoft recognizes the huge potential in the things that we are doing. That Babbobox is pushing the boundaries and transforming the way we search in future."

Find out more about Babbobox Search Engine.
Watch this space for more updates!

Let's talk Unstructured Data! Babbobox CEO, Alex Chan, will be speaking at SWITCH 2017!

Babbobox CEO Alex Chan SWITCH 2017

Every one of us is bombarded with information through various media on a daily basis. Just how do we deal with all of it?

Babbobox CEO, Alex Chan, will be joined by Infini Video's Ken Lim to examine how data can be better managed such that users can navigate complex topics more easily.

Catch Ken and Alex at Campus Day as they share more on how we can use unstructured data efficiently!

Register here: http://eventregist.com/e/SWITCH-Pass-2017

#CPSG1 #CPDAY #SwitchSG17 #Babbobox

Announcement: Ricoh Asia partners Babbobox to build B2B Marketplace

ricoh babbobox

We are delighted to announce that Babbobox will be the technology partner for Ricoh Asia to revamp the Ricoh Asia Marketplace. Though it comes as no surprise since the same team had built the first marketplace, but it is still a honour for Ricoh Asia to continue this partnership with us for years to come.

Ricoh Asia (RA) Marketplace is a centralised B2B platform where Ricoh sales companies and distributors  place orders for numerous solution offerings from regional business partners. This B2B platforms serves more than 11 countries within the Asia Pacific region. 

"We are delighted to continue our partnership with Ricoh Asia for the RA Marketplace." says Alex Chan, CEO of Babbobox. "Futhermore, we are also working closely to explore how we can use technology to disrupt the current definition of Office Automation."

Watch out for this space for more updates about the Ricoh Asia and Babbobox partnership!

World's First Video-Search-as-a-Service (VSaaS)? #Part 2 - Searching Text

Think of VideoSpace Video-Search-as-a-Service as the Ultimate SEO Engine. That's because we are able to index and search videos in 6 areas: Speech, Text, Motion, Face, Emotion and Offensive Contention. We use Artificial Intelligence to automatically extract data from your videos so that you can make better sense of your videos. More importantly, this service is absolutely affordable! 

#PART 2 - SEARCHING TEXT

Search Engine today can only crawl video "Title" and "Metadata". However, the main problem is that this search is limited by the words that are manually entered into these fields. Many do not even have metadata which makes their videos virtually impossible to search. 

If you have a library of video PRESENTATIONS, this is exactly what you need!

Video-Search-as-a-Service does the following automatically:  

  • Video OCR text in the video (available in 26 languages1)
  • make the speech searchable
  • generates SEO for the video

If you can't find it, you can't use it!

It's as simple as that. Search is a fundamental human and organisational need. Video Content can be expensive to produce and maintain. What VSaaS really does is enhancing the video content that you or your organisational possess. 

We will be launching our Video-Search-as-a-Service (VSaaS) at the Singapore leg of the Microsoft Tech Summit held between March 13 to 14, 2017. This event has filled up quickly, so I encourage you to reserve a spot NOW! So click on the link below to register! 

World's First Video-Search-as-a-Service (VSaaS)? #Part 1 - Searching Speech

Think of VideoSpace Video-Search-as-a-Service as the Ultimate SEO Engine. That's because we are able to index and search videos in 6 areas: Speech, Text, Motion, Face, Emotion and Offensive Contention. We use Artificial Intelligence to automatically extract data from your videos so that you can make better sense of your videos. More importantly, this service is absolutely affordable! 

#Part 1 - Searching Speech

Search Engine today can only crawl video "Title" and "Metadata". However, the main problem is that this search is limited by the words that are manually entered into these fields. Many do not even have metadata which makes their videos virtually impossible to search. 

If you have a library of videos (and audio), this is exactly what you need!

In an hour, a person can say up to 9,000 words. Video-Search-as-a-Service does the following automatically:  

  • transcribe the speech in the video 
  • make the speech searchable 
  • brings the users to exactly where the search terms are in the video
  • generates SEO for the video
videospace_video-search-as-a-service

If you can't find it, you can't use it!

It's as simple as that. Search is a fundamental human and organisational need. Video Content can be expensive to produce and maintain. What VSaaS really does is enhancing the video content that you or your organisational possess. 

We will be launching our Video-Search-as-a-Service at the Singapore leg of the Microsoft Tech Summit held between March 13 to 14, 2017. This event has filled up quickly, so I encourage you to reserve a spot NOW! So click on the link below to register! 

See you at our booth!

 

Announcement: Babbobox and VideoSpace to launch a World's First at Microsoft Tech Summit in Singapore

Once a year, Microsoft runs a free, two-day training summit on cloud technologies in select cities. Along in this Summit, Microsoft would invite exclusive partners who are able to are on the leading edge of technology.

 
 

This year, we are proud to announce that Babbobox and VideoSpace will be part of the Singapore leg of the Tech Summit held between March 13 to 14, 2017. We will also be taking this opportunity to launch a World's First! So stay tune for upcoming news about this!

"We are excited about being invited to be part of this exclusive Tech Summit. It shows that Babbobox is right at the leading edge of technology." says Babbobox CEO, Alex Chan "We are also excited about the World's First that we will be launching during the Summit. There is no better platform than the Tech Summit"

Here's a little more about the Microsoft Tech Summit for those who has never been to one before. It is ran by top engineers from Microsoft’s own cloud teams. With more than 50 technical sessions, the summit covers a wide range of cloud topics across Azure and the hybrid platform, including security, networking, data, storage, identity, mobile, cloud infrastructure, management, devops, app platform, productivity, collaboration and more. And here’s where it’s really different: you’ll have direct access to the people who build and run the cloud services across Azure, Office 365, and Windows 10. All for FREE.

In the past, this event has filled up quickly, so I encourage you to reserve a spot NOW! So click on the link below to register!

While you are at the Summit, drop by our booth and say hello! I promise you that we'll blow you away with what we are officially launching! Moreover, it's a World's First! 

Announcement: VideoSpace to add Japanese Speech Recognition support to Video.Search and Video-Search-as-a-Service

VideoSpace is happy to announce the release of Japanese language speech recognition to its Video.Search capabilities. This release will also be added to Video-Search-as-a-Service (VSaaS). This release will increase the total number of languages supported to nine. These nine languages are:

  • English
  • Chinese
  • Spanish
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Portuguese (Brazilian)
  • Arabic (Egyptian)
  • Japanese

 "We are excited about this new release because this means Japanese enterprises can now benefit from VideoSpace's unique value proposition" says Babbobox CEO, Alex Chan. "Search is a fundamental need for humankind. Adding a new language means making more native knowledge discoverable via our Video Search. This explains our excitement every time a new language is added"

Japanese language support on VideoSpace is now available! For further enquiries, please write to contact us

BABBOBOX AND CLEVERTIME-CONSULTING ANNOUNCE STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP TO OFFER VIDEO SEARCH SERVICES AND INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE STORAGE SOLUTIONS TO EUROPEAN UNION (EU) CUSTOMERS

Babbobox and Clevertime-Consulting is announcing a strategic partnership that will make the general availability of Babbobox and VideoSpace Software and Services in the European Union region.

Since 1995, Clevertime-Consulting (www.clevertime-consulting.eu) has been specializing in helping European organizations to be more efficient in the execution of their business rules so that fixed costs are brought to a minimum. This is achieved by a strict control of documents and the data they carry as well as managing processes and intelligent searches in order to find the information that is necessary.

According to studies, by 2019, 80% of internet traffic will be video. However, there is still no cost-effective way of searching video content. This is where the market is waiting for a technology like Babbobox and VideoSpace to fulfill these demand for search. Babbobox is targeted specifically at the enterprise storage level and VideoSpace at the “Enterprise YouTube” market segment, especially since both software have European language capabilities (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese)

Babbobox (www.babbobox.com) is the next generation of intelligent enterprise storage with the most powerful Search Engine in the world. Babbobox Search is the only unified search engine in the world that enables enterprises to "Search Everything" - allowing enterprises to search INSIDE all their digital assets - documentsaudio and video files.

VideoSpace (www.videospace.co) is one of the most advanced video platform that allows customers stream, watch, search and translate video. Also included as part of VideoSpace Services, is the world's first Video-Search-as-a-Service (VSaaS) where customers can pick and choose one or more areas that customers would like us to analyze. Our Video Search service focuses on 6 main areas: Speech Recognition, Words or Text, Motion Detection, Face Detection, Emotion Detection and Offensive Content Detection.

“We are delighted to have Clevertime-Consulting as our first strategic partner for the EU market.” Says Alex Chan, Babbobox CEO “Clevertime-Consulting has a long and rich history in helping European enterprises, we are confident that this partnership will meet the increasing multimedia needs of European customers – in terms of video and enterprise storage.”

"This partnership is all a company like ours could wish for. I am still speechless with the expanded horizons Babbobox solutions will allow European customers, private and governmental, to achieve." stated Joao Penha-Lopes CEO of CleverTime-Consulting LLC

With this strategic partnership, European enterprises will have access to these ground-breaking, innovative video search and generation of intelligent enterprise storage services. With the exponential growth in video content, this partnership is poised to meet these increasing global media demands. 

What is a Video Search Engine?

Let's dissect this into 2 parts - "Video" and "Search Engine". 

Starting with "Search Engine" first. We are so used to using search engines today that we do not really bother with how a search engine really works. And perhaps you shouldn't... why should you as long as the results are good. We normally start questioning (or complain) when the results are not what we expect it to be. 

So a good search engine should do a couple of things. It should (let's get a bit technical) have:

  • A good Indexing engine
  • Phrase matching
  • Smart Search result Summary 
  • Keyword highlighting
  • Stemming/Lemmas (Word form variations are searched and ranked lower)
  • Complex expression support; nested groups, partial matching, NOT, OR and AND
  • Multiple Format indexing
  • Unicode and non English language support

It all the above these parameters are measurable, you will be able to figure out if one engine is better than another. 

So the format that we want to search is "Video". Today, typical search engines can only search "Title" and "Metadata". Even if both "title" and "metadata" are well defined and representative of the video itself, what is missing is the content. Imagine you have a thousand page document and you can only search the document title and it's summary. That's the current state of affairs for video search. 

So of course the next question is what do you want to search from a "Video"? That's like opening Paradox's Box. Unlike a piece of document, video is multi-dimensional and contains a lot more information. For example, speech, words, people, objects, movement, colours, etc. 

Currently, many of these search technologies still do not exist or are barely in their infancy. What is available now, is just scratching the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, the real definition of what is a video search engine is currently evolving. 

At VideoSpace, we would like to define our version of VIdeo Search Engine. Where our VIdeo Search Engine is able to search six key areas:

  • Speech Recognition
  • Words (or Text)
  • Motion Detection
  • Facial Detection
  • Emotion Detection
  • Offensive Content Detection

Numbers reports say the same thing. By 2017, videos will account for more than 70% of all internet traffic. Imagine you have the ability to search videos in future. 

The VideoSpace Video Search Engine is taking the leap now. 

Difference between VideoSpace's Video Search Engine vs. other search engines

We get quite a lot people asking us the same question... "What's the difference between VideoSpace Video Search Engine and other search engines?". And we thought the best way is to use icebergs to explain this. 

Typical search engine today can only search the tip of the iceberg, but we all know more than 90% of the real content is submerged underwater. That's the difference! 

Search engines today can only search "Title" and "Metadata". But VideoSpace's Video Search Engine can also search for:

  • "Title"
  • "Metadata"
  • "Speech" (spoken in the video) 
  • "Words" (appearing in the video)

In the example below, the "Title" and "Metadata" provides very little evidence of the actual discussion made in the panel session. Without VideoSpace Video Search Engine, we wouldn't know that the term "Arts Program" was mentioned 5 times. Or even "Japan" was mentioned during the panel discussion. 

With the VideoSpace Video Search Engine, we can even pinpoint exactly where the word "Japan" was spoken. 

This is something you need to see for yourself!

#1 Click on the image below
#2 Type "Japan" into the search box
#3 Click onto any of the resultant links

History made with National Arts Council (Singapore)!

The Arts in Eldercare Seminar is one of National Arts Council's annual marquee event in their calendar. The 2016 edition was held at The National Gallery Singapore and is graced by a Senior Minister of State, Dr Amy Khor. The Arts in Eldercare Seminar is an annual platform bringing together social and healthcare practitioners, aged care policymakers and artists, to explore how the arts can engage and empower our elderly for creative ageing.

National Gallery Singapore Auditorium

Broadcast to one of the overflow rooms

Broadcast using VideoSpace production kit (all from a backpack!)

VideoSpace broadcast this event 'live' out of the National Gallery's auditorium to large screens in two overflow rooms so that more can be accommodated for this event. Also, and for the first time in the event's history, this event is viewed in more than 5 countries, making this an international event! Apparently, another piece of history was made as this was also the first time an event is broadcast live outside of National Gallery Singapore! 

From the video analytics that was gathered, we found that approximately 50% who tuned in to this broadcast online watched it on a mobile device! This goes to show the importance of having the adaptive streaming to mobile devices. 

VideoSpace is proud to be doing its part for the Arts scene in Singapore and will be looking forward to next year's event in 2017!

VideoSpace to broadcast Arts in Eldercare Seminar 2016

arts in eldercare 2016

VideoSpace is proud to be live streaming partner for Arts in ElderCare Seminar 2016 organised by National Arts Council of Singapore. Broadcast details are as follows:

Date: 1 September, 2016
Time: 9.00am to 3.00pm
Venue: National Gallery Singapore
Broadcast Link: videospace.co/artsineldercare

To find out more about this event, please go to https://www.artsineldercare.sg

ANNOUNCEMENT: VideoSpace to launch Video Translation service with 50+ supported languages

There are many translation services out there. Some of the best are even free. However, they are all text-to-text translation. However, what we offer is Video-to-Text translation service. 

In other words, what makes our Video Translation service unique is that we can take your video, machine-transcribe speech-to-text and then translate it to over 50+ languages. After which, we are able to use these translated text for Video Subtitles (Caption) in Multiple Languages.

Our Video.Translation Engine allows publishers to add subtitles in up to 50+ language to their web video delivering a rich contextual multimedia experience. We also allow your viewer to choose which  subtitle language to watch content directly from the video.

Video.Translation is ideal for:
- foreign language viewers and users who prefer to watch your videos without sound.
- enabling your content to reach for hard of hearing and the deaf community with the ability of subtitled content. 

"We are excited about this new development and service." said Alex Chan, Babbobox CEO "We believe that our Video.Translation service will deliver the cutting edge for VideoSpace. Most importantly, delivering value to clients whom may not be able to afford traditional professional services fees." 

VideoSpace to experiment with Video OCR (optical character recognition) technology

videospace

In the hunt for added capabilities for indexing and search, VideoSpace is happy to announce that we are currently looking into adding Video OCR (optical character recognition) technology as part of our enterprise offering. 

Video OCR, is a lot more advanced than mere OCR in documents and even images, because it has to go through each individual frame of video. 

For VideoSpace, this means that we are looking into the possibilities to incorporate 2 state-of-the-art technologies and techniques to enable search - Video Indexing and Video OCR. 

As for today, the Video OCR engine that we are experimenting with can recognize and support the following languages:

  • Arabic
  • Chinese Simplified
  • Chinese Traditional
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Finnish
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Serbian Cyrillic
  • Serbian Latin
  • Slovak
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Turkish

Watch this space for further updates!

6 New Languages to be added into Video.Search! (Preview)

Exciting news! In addition to English and Spanish, we will be able to index and search 6 NEW languages very soon. These 6 new languages are:

  • Chinese 
  • French 
  • German
  • Italian 
  • Portuguese 
  • Arabic (Egyptian)

They are currently still in preview mode, therefore, we are not able to officially accept jobs in these languages yet. However, if you would like to try them out using with short clip (less than 5 mins), please CONTACT US.