LazyCap - Template-Based Media Capturing

The rapid adoption of digital cameras and camcorders leads to an explosive growth of personal photos and home video in digital form. This leads to a huge demand for new tools and systems that enables average users to more efficiently and more effectively process, manage, author and share these digital media contents. However, these tasks are always tedious, as well as extremely time consuming, requiring necessary professional skills. To tackle this issue, content analysis based methods has become an interesting and promising research topic. However, due to the difficulties in content analysis after the media data is captured, these methods have insurmountable limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, Template-Based Media Capturing, which provides a uniform scheme to collect extra information during the process of media capturing in an easy and convenient manner. The extra information captured using LazyCap remarkably facilitates further personal media applications such as management, authoring and sharing. The main idea to accomplish this objective is using uniformly defined capturing templates, which are installed on the capturing devices and instantly guide users to capture necessary raw data. LazyCap not only improves the users’ experiences on media management, authoring and sharing after capturing, but also assists users to capture high-quality raw media data.