A User-Centric System for Home Movie Summarisation

In this paper we present a user-centric summarisation system that combines automatic visual-content analysis with user-interface design features as a practical method for home movie summarisation. The proposed summarisation system is designed in such a manner that the video segmentation results generated by the automatic content analysis tools are further subject to refinement through the use of an intuitive user-interface so that the automatically created summaries can be effectively tailored to each individual's personal need. To this end, we study a number of content analysis techniques to facilitate the efficient computation of video summaries, and more specifically emphasise the need for employing an efficient and robust optical flow field computation method for sub-shot segmentation in home movies. Due to the subjectivity of video summarisation and the inherent challenges associated with automatic content analysis, we propose novel user-interface design features as a means to enable the creation of meaningful home movie summaries in a simple manner. The main features of the proposed summarisation system include the ability to automatically create summaries of different visual comprehension, interactively defining the target length of the desired summary, easy and interactive viewing of the content in terms of a storyboard, and manual refinement of the boundaries of the automatically selected video segments in the summary.