Video processing: the value of on-line services

RealityFrontier is working on video content analysis. What is it? Can it be an on-line service? What are the other service providers?

Video content analysis looks into a video footage, frame by frame, and identifies relevant information. It is different from video monitoring analytics or video viewing analytics. Video analytics is primarily used by security firms for real-time area surveillance. Video viewing analytics is used by media agencies for ads placement based on the video metadata. By contrast, video content analysis goes one step further: it looks into the video content itself, extracts key information and rebuild the storyline.

From a broader standpoint, the software industry is moving to a device + datacenter model. For the purpose of analysing video content, the mobile device offers the capability to acquire and display video while a series of on-line services are providing the video services. Let’s have a look at what the range of services readily available.

Video content analysis is a fragmented market: service providers are focused on particular scenarios they understand. The companies often have invested years in developing their technology. Some existing platforms are for instance Blinkx, Gotuit, Google or yet Viewdle.

• Launched in 2005, Blinkx went through two IPO and has a market capitalization of $350M. It indexed 35 million hours of videos through 720+ media partners.
• Google rescently launched their Goggle service that let users search the web with pictures they take from an Android or an iPhone.
• GotuitMedia is a social video tagging SaaS application. The platform tags video content and lets the user access the video segments that matter to them.
• Viewdle is a digital media platform that offers face recognition. The service analyzes each frame in order to create a index that will be used to monetize video assets.

How does RealityFrontier compare to these services? Firstly, we are in the business of assisting our customer with customized product realization – as opposed to building a generic platform. To that extend, we are reusing the services of larger players for custom scenarios. Our services are targeted to real-time analysis. We focus on enhancing the capability of mobile devices with on-line web services. Our video analysis leverage hardware acceleration, a technique that allows realtime processing. We go one step further by providing complex event processing on top of video content indexing.

Here’s an example to give an idea of the type of results a video search can provide. Let’s look up “augmented reality” on a Blinkx Wall.