With the fast growth ofmultimedia information, content-based video anal ysis, indexing and representation have attracted increasing attention in re cent years. Many applications have emerged in these areas such as video on-demand, distributed multimedia systems, digital video libraries, distance learning/education, entertainment, surveillance and geographical information systems. The need for content-based video indexing and retrieval was also rec ognized by ISOIMPEG, and a new international standard called "Multimedia Content Description Interface" (or in short, MPEG-7)was initialized in...