INTRODUCTION TO CONTENT-BASED VISUAL PROCESSING - Video Object Extraction and Representation: Theory and Applications - page 1

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION TO CONTENT-BASED
VISUAL PROCESSING

Energy and production now tend to fuse with information and learning.
Marketing and consumption tend to become one with learning, enlightenment
and the intake of information. This is all part of the electric implosion that
now follows or succeeds the centuries of explosion and increasing specialism.
The electronic age is literally one of illumination. Just as light is at once energy
and information, so electric automation unites production, consumption and
learning in an inextricable process.
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man
The Information Age is upon us. The raw material of this age is
information; the product is content. The computational might of the
integrated silicon transistor drives this age forward. In the eighties and
nineties, the computer industry infrastructure was geared to produce
faster, more powerful and cheaper engines on these pieces of silicon.
Already, we use computers everyday: explicitly, to write programs, to
create spreadsheets, or to make airline reservations with workstations
and personal computers; implicitly, to control our household appliances,
telephones, and cars with microcontrollers and embedded systems. How-
ever, the role of computer as a controller is merely the first step in the
coming information age and the specialized action of “using a computer”
shows how immature this information age is. The electrical power in-
frastructure is mature when and only when one can plug into a wall
socket and not have to understand the concept of the step-down trans-
former. The next great step of this information age is to apply this
computational power into systems that support a dynamic “new” media
based upon audio-video content-based technologies. These technologies
not only compress and transport but also allow users to actively trans-
form and create content. The information age will not be defined by
deliverable products such as a lGHz microprocessor, but by computa-