Development of Integrated Search, VideoPoints

Abstract: During the last few years, an advanced lecture video portal called VideoPoints has been developed at the University of Houston to utilize recorded lecture videos to support classrooms. This web portal focuses on helping students locate their content of interest as quickly and precisely as possible. Some of the important features of VideoPoints are: Content-based Indexing: dividing lecture video into a sequence of cohesive video segments, each covering a subtopic in the presentation. Video Summarization: generating keywords and images that summarize each video segment.Search: find all video segments that contain the keywords of interest.The short-term purpose of this project is to add the ability to search in the audio captions (transcripts), considering the importance of verbal explanation. The long-term purpose is to improve the Video Summarization feature with important keywords rated by the number of occurrences of them in both speech and slides. Currently, the web portal fetches both video contents and audio captions for all keyword occurrences. Hence, we can quickly allocate all the segments that contain the keywords of interest. Then, we developed a ranking system to rate the mixed search result from both video segments and audio captions based on the frequency and the importance of keywords. The result is then displayed on top of each video segment thumbnail as a rating bar, which helps students find their desired content easier. Finally, we also refined the key suggestion based on the frequency and the user’s searching history.