Babbobox featured on The Record for their World's First

Our launch - "World's First Video Search Engine with Interactive Results" in Birmingham (UK) was picked up by The Record and given some airtime. It feels great to be picked up and be given that bit of recognition for doing what we do to a global audience. 

Click HERE for the article.

Note: The Record is a global magazine featuring the Best of Enterprise Technology on The Microsoft Platform.

Thank you Birmingham... Hello Washington!

Finally, 2 intensive days of MS Tech Summit in Birmingham... done and dusted. Absolutely the right decision to come to UK to do this. Massive event! Exactly the right platform to showcase our Video Search technologies. 

babbobox-ceo-alex-chan
babbobox-ceo-alex-chan-clevertime-joao-penha-lopes
mstechsummit-birmingham

Caught up with Scott Guthrie. Held so many in-depth discussion with so many UK enterprises, universities, government agencies, etc. If we have our way, our stuff might even end up in Scotland Yard! So let's see... 

Good-bye Birmingham... Next stop, Trump-capital Washington in March! I'm excited already...

ANNOUNCEMENT: Global Launch of World’s First “Video Search Engine with Interactive Results”

Birmingham, 24 January 2018: - Babbobox and Infini Videos officially announce the launch of the world’s first  “Video Search Engine with Interactive Results” at the Microsoft Tech Summit held in Birmingham, United Kingdom today.

Both tech start-ups Babbobox and Infini Videos believe the future of video search lies in immediate content relevance. Video has proven to be the hardest medium to index because there is so much detail.  Aside from the metadata that an editor may have typed in, most archived videos are essentially unstructured data.  Often, this is because transcripts are not made and scripts are lost, or there isn’t sufficient timing information to align with the video.

To make sense of this data, techniques such as Speech Recognition, Video OCR, Image analysis and various Cognitive and Artificial Intelligence are applied to extract data from media. Since much of the videos in archives contains speech, therefore automatic transcription is a great first step in extracting data from media. With the transcript, an editor is able to search for timecodes in source videos, scrub through those sources, and manually locate viable scenes. This manual process is time-consuming, and not suitable for public use since a text search result does not make for a watchable video.

The innovative “Video Search Engine with Interactive Results” that Babbobox and Infini Videos have co-produced, allows a user to search a topic, and immediately view the search results as an interactive video. One is able to immediately choose scenes within the video that are relevant to the search. With the full-automation of the indexing and the output scene selection, productivity is enhanced and content for the public will scale up. The platform promises increased productivity as it will provide users with fine control over topics and sources, and allow editors to focus on the direction of the stories.

Babbobox and Infini Videos believe that this will be the future of Video Search.

About Babbobox (website: www.babbobox.com)
Babbobox launched two World’s First - World’s First True Unified Search Engine where it has the ability to index and “Search Everything” (all formats including video, audio and documents). Thus, positioning Babbobox to become "The Next Generation of Intelligent Storage". With VideoSpace, we created the World’s Frist Video-Search-as-a-Service. Thus, forming the foundations to enable a new breed of video services for the world.

About Infini Videos (website: www.infinivideos.com)
Infini Videos is a B2B online technology platform for the creation and delivery of HTML5 interactive videos. Infini Videos makes it easy to create engaging interactive videos as well as to access the rich data analytics offered on the platform. The company currently offers branching aka “Choose-your-own-adventure” and 360-degree types of interactivity. In addition to the technology platform, the company also provides specialized creative services as a one-stop solution for clients. Infini Videos is part of the Mediacorp’s MediaPreneur Incubator programme.

To find out more, please CONTACT US

Bringing VideoSpace to the World... Starting with Birmingham

MSTechSummit_Birmingham_728x90.png

Many asked why we were not present at Microsoft Tech Summit Singapore this week... The reason is simple, that's because we will be in the Birmingham leg (24 to 25 Jan) next week instead!

I promise that we will be making a BIG announcement next week. And it will be another World's First! (Hint: We are bringing Video Search to another level...)

babbobox tech summit birmingham

It definitely feels great to see Babbobox listed as part of the invited companies to show our wares at this Microsoft Tier-1 event. On top of that, I can also that we are representing Asia alongside Yamaha.

If any of you do happen to be in Tech Summit Birmingham, do drop by and say Hi!

Episode X - A New Search (and a Forceful 2018!)

CLICK to watch how VideoSpace aid the Rebels in their search for the New Death Star...

In search of the new Death Star plans, the Rebels secretly planted thousands of cameras within the Empire in hope of finding clues. However, with thousands of videos and impending deadline, how can the rebels possibly search for information within videos?! Fortunately...

IN A GALAXY, NOT FAR AWAY... 

VideoSpace Search Engine is helping the Rebels searches inside videos for speech, text, objects, motion, faces, emotions (note: not for stormtroopers since they wear helmets) automatically! Thus, finding vital clues for the New Death Star plans...

In the meantime, as we help the Rebels fight the Evil Empire, we wish you a...

FORCEFUL 2018! 

From, 

All of us at Babbobox

MAY THE SEARCH BE WITH YOU!

What is a Video Search Engine? Part V – Detecting Objects

After discussing the ability to video search for Speech, Text, Motion, Face and Emotions, the next big element class is “Objects”.

video search engine object detection

Essentially, it is an analysis tool that extracts metadata from a video and defines important objects or entities inside a video. Object detection has come to a point where it can detect objects or entities (like cat, flower, computer, etc.) and pinpoint the exact location there is the scene(s) appear inside the video.

The purpose of Object Detection is to help us better understand the overall content of our videos based on objects detected within the video. It also gives uas a time-based understanding on when each object appears within the video. Object Detection basically uses tagging and domain-specific models to identify content and label it with confidence.

Like other vision type of video searches, Computer Vision scientists developed Object Recognition based on the deep learning technology developed using deep neural network models to detect and label thousands of objects and scenes in videos.

video search engine object detection

With Object Detection, it is now possible to search every moment of every video file in your video library and catalog to find every objects as well as its importance.

To find out more about how you can detect objects inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.

Announcement – Adding “Object Detection” to VideoSpace Search Engine

We are delighted to announce that we are adding “Object Detection” capability to our Video Search Engine.

This is a significant milestone as it enhances our already extensive video search capabilities. Thus, establishing VideoSpace Search Engine’s as one of the most powerful Video Search Engine in the world.

With Object Detection, this is the list of elements that we can index and search inside videos:

  • Objects (NEW!)
  • Speech
  • Text
  • Motion
  • Face
  • Emotion
  • Offensive Content
  • Custom (e.g. Logos, Objects, Landmarks, etc.)
videospace video search engine object detection

The new “Object Detection” feature enables us to detect entities (like cat, flower, computer, etc.) and pinpoint the exact location there is the scene(s) appear inside videos.

For example, in this short four minute VIDEO, we are able to:

  • detect 111 unique entities
  • mark exactly where these 111 entities appear

To find out more about Object Detection in videos, please click HERE.

What is a Video Search Engine? Part IV – Detecting Faces and Emotions

The ability to detect faces has been around for some time for real time CCTV systems. However, these systems out of reach for many as they are expensive and would need specialized implementation that would drive the cost up higher. Therefore, detecting faces from videos instead is a viable alternative because it instantly adds face detection ability to any CCTV system.

Detecting faces allows you to count, track movements by detecting unique faces. Face detection finds and tracks human faces within a video. Multiple faces can be detected and subsequently be tracked as they move around.

video search engine face detection

This will be useful to analyze human traffic within a mall, street or even a restaurant or café. It would be possible to identify and track movement of unique human faces. Therefore, it is possible to perform a headcount of human traffic within the video. 

Beyond detecting faces, it is more possible to detect emotions. Emotion Detection is an extension of the Face Detection video search that returns analysis on multiple emotional attributes from the faces detected, for example happiness, sadness, fear, anger, etc.

video search engine emotion detection

Recognizing the emotion of a person or crowd over time based allows us to track the emotional highs and lows within a particular time-frame. It also allows us to track someone’s emotions at a specific point of time. Answering questions like, how did the crowd react when the President makes a particular point? With emotion detection, it can be applicable to gauge audience responses in scenarios like:

  • Speeches
  • Focus groups
  • Group reactions
  • Interviews

Emotion detection can form a very good baseline for the scenarios above.

To find out more about how you can detect faces and emotions inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.

What is a Video Search Engine? Part III – Detecting Motion

In Part I and II, we examined how we would be able to search Speech and Text inside videos. In Part III, we will look at one of the first names given to videos – “Motion” Picture. 

So, all videos have motion? That may not be true, not all videos have motion (or movement) all the time, especially in the case of security and surveillance videos.

video search engine - motion detection

Detecting motion in videos enables you to efficiently identify sections of interest within an otherwise long and uneventful video. That might sound simple with a single video, but what if you have 10,000 hours of videos to review every night? That’s a near impossible task to eyeball every video minute.

Motion detection can be used on static camera footage to identify sections of the video where motion occurs.

  • Detect when motion has occurred in videos with stationery backgrounds
  • Eliminate false positives caused because of light changes, shadows, small insects, and others

While there are motion sensors that can detect motion real-time, these systems tend to be expensive. Thus, the reason why most of the CCTV surveillance systems only does recording at best. Therefore, there are many scenarios that does not require real-time motion detection, like detecting a car entering a bus lane during peak hours.

video search engine - bus lane detection

Current technology has come to a point where it is able to differentiate between real motion (such as a person walking into a room), and false positives (such as leaves in the wind, along with shadow or light changes). This allows you to generate security alerts from camera feeds without being spammed with endless irrelevant events, while being able to extract moments of interest from extremely long surveillance videos.

To find out more about how you can detect motion inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.

What is a Video Search Engine? Part II – Searching Text

In Part I, we found out that there are 7099 living languages in the world. That includes both written and spoken only languages. According to Ethnologue (20th edition) out of that 7,099 living languages, 3,866 have a developed writing system.

Which leads us to this second part of our series – Searching Text inside a video. Besides Speech, Text is probably the second most important element where we can extract data from.

For example, in a presentation or talk given by a speaker. Besides speech, the speaker would augment the session with a set of slides. Therefore, besides his voice, text (in the slides) is another set of data that can be captured. This is important because what he says and what he present in the slides can be vastly different.

Text that can be OCRed during a presentation

Text that can be OCRed during a presentation

The technology to capture these text inside the video is called Video OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Video OCR is derived from OCR, a technology that has been around a long time.

By strict definition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo or from subtitle text superimposed on an image (source: Wikipedia). The first OCR machine that read characters and converted them into standard telegraph code was invented by Emanuel Goldberg in 1914!

Unfortunately, one hundred years on, OCR technology still has some ways to go, especially in the field of adding more language capabilities and recognizing handwriting. However, with more A.I. and Machine Learning, the hope is that researchers can add more capabilities to what OCR can do now.

However, Video OCR is giving OCR a new lease of life by simply adding another dimension – moving images. Given the amount of videos that has never been OCRed before and the amount of videos being generated every day, the potential for Video OCR is immerse.

To find out more about how you can search TEXT inside your videos, visit VideoSpace Video Search Engine or our Video-Search-as-a-Service.