ViewStation Applications: Intelligent Video Processing Over a Broadband Local Area Network

This paper describes applications built on the ViewStation, a distributed multimedia system based on Unix workstations and a gigabit per second local area network. A key tenet of the ViewStation project is the delivery of media data not just to the desktop but all the way to the application program. We have written applications that directly process live video to provide more responsive human-computer interaction. We have also developed applications to explore the potential of media processing to support content-based retrieval of pre-recorded television broadcasts. These applications perform intelligent processing on video, as well as straightforward presentation. They demonstrate the utility of network-based multimedia systems that deliver audio and video data all the way to the application. The network requirements of the applications are a combination of bursty transfers and periodic packet-trains.