CASA

Consumer

All-Purpose

Storage Manager

CASA is designed as an alternative to PC for storing, managing and delivering multimedia content for the home.

oday, devices used in home are becoming digital and we are seeing all kinds of consumer appliances becoming digital. The paradigm of audio tapes, CDs, video tapes and DVDs is quickly disappearing. With CASA, people everywhere can gain greater access to their personal multimedia assets. With the use of various IBM Research Technologies, we can create and manage collections of all the text, images, audio, music and video that a person would acquire in a lifetime. CASA deals with long term storage, management and distribution of digital media.

CASA is the beginning of a multimedia library for the future, offering access not only to text, but to just about anything that can be digitized: audio, video, photographs and more. It integrates technology for information capture, storage management, search and retrieval, implicit and explicit categorization of digital content and provides indexing of a user's assets.

The HDD areal density improvement starts to make it economically feasible to store these media in digital formats on HDD. A single-disk (or possibly dual-disk for availability) device integrating storage and organization for all these media is now attractive for the home. Many of the technologies we developed for the IT industry are applicable to tackle the home storage management issues (e.g. database for organization, highly-available file systems for robustness, silicon integration for cost reduction, data distribution - database and file system - for sharing, security technology for acquiring data from commercial servers, NAS functionality for talking to home PC's). Such an appliance is also applicable to Small Office Home Office (SOHO) environment where media-rich web pages are becoming pervasive.

CASA can acquire paper documents, photographic images, and multimedia files from legacy devices attached to USB ports, or via Firewire or Ethernet networks. Once the information is acquired, CASA creates an index, automatically where possible and with human intervention where not, in a DB2 database and links the index to the corresponding document image or multimedia file. It also provides authoring tools to create additional indexes and cross links, or to add additional information about the digital content.

CASA can be used to

• Leverage existing investments in legacy devices
• Provide lightning quick access to digital content
• Integrate document imaging and multimedia
• Improve efficiency

CASA allows for easy search and access, with various options for searching text, image and video objects. For example, today users can:

• Search audio by lyric title, lyric author or lyric text
• Search images by color average, distribution, position, image texture or keywords
• Search video and audio by performing fuzzy and phonetic searches through IBM's ViaVoice
• Use a speech command interface

Contact Sandeep Gopisetty for more information.

 

Related Links:

QBIC

WebSphere

          DB2

BlueEyes

DataLinks

CueVideo

Extreme Blue

Voice Systems

 

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