What is VARS?
The Video Annotation and Reference System (VARS) is a software interface and database system that provides tools for describing, cataloging, retrieving, and viewing the visual, descriptive, and quantitative data associated with video. Developed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) for annotating deep-sea video data, VARS is currently being used to describe over 4500 dives by our remotely operated vehicles (ROV). VARS has allowed MBARI scientists to produce numerous quanititative and qualitative scientific publications based on video data.
Although originally designed for annotating underwater video, VARS can be applied to any video dataset that requires constrained (i.e. searchable) annotations.
VARS is a suite of 3 applications: Annotation, Knowledgebase, and Query. All three applications are written in Java and have been tested on Windows PCs and Macs. VARS can be used to annotate video from either VCRs that support RS422 control or movie files, such as QuickTime and AVI movies.
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News
2011-12-08 - Merry Christmas! There's a new release of VARS out. This release is compatible with all 6.x version databases. So you can run your existing database with this new version of VARS. Check it out at the VARS download page.
2011-10-28 - Adding 'undo' and 'redo' to the VARS annotation interface. Also added a measurement tool to capture pixel-to-pixel distance on images. I haven't rolled those changes out in a new release quite yet; we're still debugging them.
2011-01-18 - A mailing list for VARS questions, announcements and discussion is now available at http://groups.google.com/group/mbari-vars.
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