Interactive video exploration using pose slices

The availability of video content is rapidly growing. In contrast, our time for selecting and watching videos remains limited. This work presents an interactive video browser that addresses two inherent bottlenecks in video browsing: user time and screen space. To alleviate both limitations while preserving the crux of the original visual information, we track and extract video objects, and fuse selected instantaneous objects’ appearances, denoted as pose slices, into a single display. We also develop rendering techniques that maximize the visibility of the activity in the clip by interactively controlling the viewing angles, the number of instantaneous objects and transparency values. We discuss the method’s benefits and limitations, and illustrate its usability using a variety of home videos, sports clips and movie DVDs. The new visualization technique is a generalization of an informative timeline and a synopsis mosaic, corresponding to 90◦ and 0◦ rotation in our visualization respectively. In addition, displaying all poses sequentially pose-by-pose results in a regular video playback. Thus, it could also be viewed as bridging the gap between still and video.