As internet connections have become faster over the last few years, video on the internet has become huge. Services like YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer have been phenomenally successful and watching video on the internet has taken a dent out of regular TV ratings. What hasn't kept up with this change is the way we search for video online. Until now.VideoSurf is a video search engine whose technology looks set to revolutionise video search. Currently the search facility on YouTube relies on users tagging and titling their videos properly when uploading them. This is a spammer's paradise. Giving your video a misleading title, tags or description can easily increase the amount of viewers. VideoSurf plans not just to change that but to deliver highly relevant search results in the process.
The technical problems of video search are not minor. Building a search engine that can look at a video, determine the contents and figure out its relevance is a tricky thing to do. Bear in mind that image search engines such as Google Images still rely on traditional methods of categorising and deciding relevance rather than actually recognising the image. If Google still hasn't managed it for still images, imagine what it's like for a video.
VideoSurf uses a process called "multigrid fast computation" to analyse videos and take all sorts of information from the moving images including recognising people.
A VideoSurf search starts, as with most searches, by typing in a keyword or phrase. You are then given a menu of thumbnail images. For each one you also get a row of images from that video that the search engine has identified as being the most useful or unique. You can then choose to either go directly to that scene or to use that image as the basis for another search. Using it to give more search results will give you videos that are relevant not just through keywords etc. but similar images or video of other people who appear in the same videos.
For example, you might do a search for "Brad Pitt". The first page might give a load of results where he appears and a row of thumbnails of scenes. Choosing to continue the search by clicking on his image might bring you videos of Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston because they are in some of the same videos as Brad - interviews, red carpets etc. Continue by clicking on Aniston and you might get the rest of the cast of friends and so on. It's only a matter of time before someone makes it into a game.
VideoSurf also lets you surf various video sources other than its own, including YouTube and various TV stations. Basically, it's a must for anyone who likes to watch video online. But what's the catch? Well, at the moment you have to apply to video surf for an invitation to use the service. It is possible that this is the technology being showcased for a sale to a bigger player, perhaps Google/YouTube. Either way, it looks like video search will soon change for the better.
