Asterpix Adds Industry's First Automated In-Video Tagging

Yesterday we covered a discussion that we had with the CEO of Asterpix where he walked us through a detailed overview of how the new Asterpix technology works.

Here is the press release announcement:

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Asterpix, the leader in interactive video, today announced technology that automatically tags any internet video with interactive hotspots on the most salient objects. The hotspots enable users to interact with objects of interest in a video to get more information relevant to the context.

Viewers can click on an object in a video to see an informative note, links to more information as well as other videos on related topics. The viewer is also offered a pre-configured search query to a search engine for additional information on the context of the hotspot. In short, the interactive hotspots offer a visual entry point to searching the web for more information on salient objects in a video.

Previously, Asterpix introduced a web-based service that enables users to create interactive videos. Now Asterpix is adding a bot (Asterbot) that automatically inserts interactive hotspots in web videos. Using a combination of video, text and link analysis, Asterbot scans each video to find the most salient objects and marks them up with hotspots. Hotspots carry relevant tags, text and links and track the objects even as they move around.

"Asterbot's in-video tagging capabilities are an industry first and represent a huge advance in technology," said Nat Kausik, Asterpix CEO. "With Asterbot crawling the Web and marking up thousands of videos daily, viewers can experience interactive hotspots on almost any video. And soon we will be making it available to partner sites.”

How Asterbot Works

(a) Asterbot crawls the web to identify a candidate video.
(b) Asterbot ranks all the objects in the video in order of the attention they receive from the camera.
(c) Asterbot clusters the text around the video such as the title, description and tags into topics, then ranks the topics in order of importance
(d) Next, the top ranked topic is associated with the top ranked object, the second ranked topic with the second ranked object and so on.
(e) Finally, Asterbot assigns links relevant to the associated topic for each object.

For example, take this popular video of a first dance at a wedding tagged by Asterbot

Asterbot automatically attaches a hotspot to the dancing bride that tracks her movement in the video. It then adds additional information on the relevant movie "Dirty Dancing," a link to the movie entry on imdb.com, as well as thumbnails of related videos.

You can experience interactive hotspots on all of the videos at Asterpix. Asterpix supports PC and Mac, and major browsers--Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari--allowing users to easily convert or view any existing video as interactive video.

Update: press release 

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