June 12, 2008, 5:26 PM — In a quest to make computing more interactive, Intel on Wednesday said it is
working on video search technology that it hopes to bring to its future multimedia
platforms.
The video search technology, which is being developed at Intel labs in U.S.
and China, cuts down videos frame-by-frame and then uses image and face recognition
technology to recognize faces, objects, voices, locations and movements. The
frames are then patched together to make video search possible.
For example, users will be able to search videos of football games to zoom
into moments when their favorite players score, said Lin Chao, a researcher
with Intel. The technology recognizes and categorizes a player's face and objects
like a goalpost and ball using algorithms and statistical processing technology
that Intel has developed.
Once a user requests to see the goal, the technology looks for frames that
contain related objects and delivers the video to the user.
Users can zoom into specific moments without watching entire videos, Chao said.
The technology's recognition capabilities also help categorize images by person
and object, which saves users from typing keywords to tag photographs.
However, the technology has challenges that can be overcome as processing power
increases, Chao said. Processing a video to make it searchable takes hours,
as current processing on PCs is limited. Chao couldn't predict when the technology
would reach consumers.
The technology is part of Intel's "visual computing," which combines
multiple cores, software development platforms and graphics capabilities to
enable a more human interaction with a PC, said Justin Rattner, chief technology
officer of Intel during a keynote at Intel's research show in Mountain View,
California, on Wednesday. Intel wants to use the visual computing platform to
enable interaction with a PC in life-like 3-D environments or to analyze video
instantly.
Intel is already working on the Larrabee platform, which will combine multicore
processors, multithreaded streams and graphics capabilities to deliver teraflops
of processing power. Larrabee is due for release in 2010.
Intel's researchers are also working on a project that can track human activity
to help caregivers. The company implemented a pilot in Seattle, where it has
deployed monitors in 20 homes to track human activity.
RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are attached to objects such as
toothbrushes, combs and medicine containers, and when those objects are moved,
the tags tell an electronic monitor. RFID bracelets worn by members of the household
identify who moved the object.
Ultimately, the technology could be used to identify if someone has taken medicine,
for example. If the medicine container with an RFID tag wasn't opened, the monitor
would alert the caregiver.
The activity tracking is unreliable for now, at between 70 percent to 90 percent
accuracy, said Matthai Philipose, a researcher at Intel. It needs to reach between
95 percent to 98 percent to become reliable, he said. No study on the technology
has been done to see if it is commercially viable, so it may or many not reach
users in the future, he said.
Human problems could also affect the use of this technology, Philipose said.
In countries like India or China, where homes have multiple caregivers, the
workload of monitoring tasks will need to be broken up equally. If multiple
people monitor tasks ineffectively, for example, people may end up taking medicine
twice.
At this stage in the project, the RFID tags are protected by black blobs of
plastic and so the lack of pleasing aesthetics is a problem, Philipose admitted.
However, the plastic makes the RFID tags dishwasher safe, he said.
