Pixlogic Looks to Enhance Asset Search Speed, Accuracy
The area of visual search continues to be one of great interest for those in the media space, and piXlogic, a company focused on visual search, will be in Las Vegas at a partner whisper suite (with StorExcel) sharing the latest developments related to its technology.
At its core is piXserve, a general-purpose enterprise-class video/image search system that automatically recognizes and tags content in video frames. The piXserve is scalable and extensible and uses a REST-based Web-Services API to make it easy to integrate piXserve’s functionality into customer workflows and third-party applications. The software creates a searchable index of information by segmenting individual objects in the image. The software can recognize broad classes of content such as vegetation, flower, face, car, etc. and tag frames accordingly. Users can also supply an example of an item of interest (a logo, a product, a specific make and model of a car, etc.) and the software can automatically tag video frames when those items are visible. Things that have been tagged can be searched for using keywords. For everything else, users can also search visually or using text search capabilities (alphanumeric characters, such as on a player’s jersey, as well as text strings in many languages).
“Drop a picture of Tom Brady into a search box, and a picture of a bottle of Gatorade into another box,” says David Steinman, sales consultant for piXlogic, “and video clips of Tom Brady with a Gatorade come up as a search results.”
Steinman says this level of indexing/auto-tagging can cover any degree of granularity of interest to the customer (down to the individual frame level), and because it is done with software, the cost of adding metadata to video is greatly reduced when compared to traditional manual methods.
Alerting capabilities extend the basic piXserve search/tag functionality so that, when visual content of interest is observed in live feed, users interested in specific content can be so informed.
“It will help your production staff search and retrieve video sequences stored in your archive more accurately and at a fraction of the cost it used to take,” says Steinman. “You will see reuse go up, costs go down, and take less time to complete a finished product.”
The system can help verify ad playout audits, as frames from a commercial can be searched against the piXserve system, and reports can be printed out showing the dates and times when a spot played out.
For more information on piXserve, how piXlogic’s partners are integrating the product, and on visiting the whisper suite at NAB, please contact David Steinman at dsteinman@pixlogic.com.