September 29, 1997

Video Indexing Via Speech Recognition Software will automate archiving By John Foley slip Media Inc., a startup software company with roots in academia, is entering the market for digital-video management systems with a product that uses speech recognition to automate the indexing and archiving of video footage. Islip, in Pittsburgh, will announce on Oct. 1 the Islip MediaKey Digital Library System. MediaKey consists of three components: a video and audio indexing service; a video search engine; and real-time cataloging and search-and-retrieval software for production environments that employ live video feeds. The system starts at $50,000 for 50 users . Potential customers include broadcast news organizations, movie studios, government agencies, and corporations. The underlying technology was developed by scientists in Carnegie Mellon University's Informedia Digital Video Library Project, which received $8 million in funding from corporate and government sponsors, including the National Science Foundation, Digital Equipment, Intel, Microsoft, and Motorola. Islip was founded in 1996 by two senior managers of the Informedia project, including Howard Wactlar, associate dean of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. The university has a 15% stake in the company. MediaKey uses speech-recognition technology to create a transcript of the video, which is aligned with the video's image frames. End users then can execute a text search to find a still image or video segment that correlates with key words in the search. Word-Finder "It can get you to the precise point in the video where someone uttered that word," says Mark Julia no, president and CEO of Islip Media. The system can also search for faces and other kinds of images. Gartner Group Inc. describes the MediaKey as a "quantum leap" in digital-video technology. Boeing Commercial Space Co. helped fund the Informedia project and is an early user of the MediaKey system. CNN, in Atlanta, also supported the project. Juliano says Islip recently bid on a contract to provide a digital-video system to CNN's news operations. MediaKey's video indexing process is provided as a service, which the company compares to film development at a photo lab. A customer's analog video and audio are digitized, then sent to a processor that creates an index and transcript. Islip then ships the indexed video on digital media back to the customer. Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

---