The multimedia content browsing
system for small mobile devices smoothly blends three key tasks: querying the
multimedia contents by keywords, exploring the search results by viewing keyframes of the
multimedia contents, and playing a
stream of the multimedia contents, e.g., videos or video segments. Videos can be stored in a segment-based multimedia content
database, which is designed to support the browsing, retrieval, and reuse of videos. A layered imaging model is introduced where each layer may have its own transparent
value set individually, continuously, and interactively, and the
layers can overlap on top of each other when rendered on the screen. Since a small
mobile device alone may not have enough resources to
handle the entire task of multimedia content browsing, a
scalable architecture can be adopted to break up the task among the small
mobile device, a Hard Disk Drive (HDD), and a resource-rich computing device.