Effects of camera position and media type on lifelogging images

With an increasing number of new camera devices entering the market, lifelogging has turned into a viable everyday practice. The promise of comprehensively capturing our life's happenings has caused adoption rates to grow, but approaches to do so greatly differ. In this paper we evaluate existing visual lifelogging capture approaches through a user study with two main capture dimensions: (1) comparing the body position where a lifelogging camera is worn: head versus chest (2) comparing the media captures: video versus stills. We equipped 30 participants with cameras on their heads and chests. That data was evaluated by subjective user ratings as well as by objective image processing analysis. Our findings indicate that (1) chest-worn devices are more stable and contain less motion blur through which feature detection by image processing algorithms works better than from head-worn cameras; 2) head-worn video cameras, however, seem to be the better choice for lifelogging as they capture more important autobiographical cues than chest-worn devices, e.g., faces that have been shown to be most relevant for recall.