1. ¹Indiana University, 1101 East 10th Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA
2. ²Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350002, China

Correspondence: Chen Yu, E-mail: chenyu@indiana.edu

Received 17 November 2008; Accepted 17 November 2008; Published online 12 February 2009.

Abstract

With advances in computing techniques, a large amount of high-resolution high-quality multimedia data (video and audio, and so on) has been collected in research laboratories in various scientific disciplines, particularly in cognitive and behavioral studies. How to automatically and effectively discover new knowledge from rich multimedia data poses a compelling challenge because most state-of-the-art data mining techniques can only search and extract pre-defined patterns or knowledge from complex heterogeneous data. In light of this challenge, we propose a hybrid approach that allows scientists to use data mining as a first pass, and then forms a closed loop of visual analysis of current results followed by more data mining work inspired by visualization, the results of which can be in turn visualized and lead to the next round of visual exploration and analysis. In this way, new insights and hypotheses gleaned from the raw data and the current level of analysis can contribute to further analysis. As a first step toward this goal, we implement a visualization system with three critical components: (1) a smooth interface between visualization and data mining; (2) a flexible tool to explore and query temporal data derived from raw multimedia data; and (3) a seamless interface between raw multimedia data and derived data. We have developed various ways to visualize both temporal correlations and statistics of multiple derived variables as well as conditional and high-order statistics. Our visualization tool allows users to explore, compare and analyze multi-stream derived variables and simultaneously switch to access raw multimedia data.