BRAHMA: browsing and retrieval architecture for hierarchical multimedia annotation

Traditional browsing of large multimedia documents (e.g., video, audio) is primarily sequential. In the absence of an index structure browsing and searching for relevant information in a long video, audio or other multimedia document becomes difficult. Manual annotation can be used to mark various segments of such documents. Different segments can be combined to create new annotated segments, thus creating hierarchical annotation structures. Given the lack of structure in media data, it is natural for different users to have different views on the same media data. Therefore, different users can create different annotation structures. Users may also share some or all of each other's annotation structures. The annotation structure can be browsed or used to playback as a composed video consisting of different segments. Finally, the annotation structures can be manipulated dynamically by different users to alter views on a document. BRAHMA is a multimedia environment for browsing and retrieval of multimedia documents based on such hierarchical annotation structures.