VISON: VIdeo Summarization for ONline applications

Recent advances in technology have increased the availability of video data, creating a strong requirement for efficient systems to manage those materials. Making efficient use of video information requires that data to be accessed in a user-friendly way. This has been the goal of a quickly evolving research area known as video summarization. Most of existing techniques to address the problem of summarizing a video sequence have focused on the uncompressed domain. However, decoding and analyzing of a video sequence are two extremely time-consuming tasks. Thus, video summaries are usually produced off-line, penalizing any user interaction. The lack of customization is very critical, as users often have different demands and resources. Since video data are usually available in compressed form, it is desirable to directly process video material without decoding. In this paper, we present VISON, a novel approach for video summarization that works in the compressed domain and allows user interaction. The proposed method is based on both exploiting visual features extracted from the video stream and on using a simple and fast algorithm to summarize the video content. Results from a rigorous empirical comparison with a subjective evaluation show that our technique produces video summaries with high quality relative to the state-of-the-art solutions and in a computational time that makes it suitable for online usage.