MSR-TR-2005-154 , November 2005 LazyCut : Content-Aware Template Based Media Authoring

The rapid adoption of digital cameras and camcorder s leads to an explosive growth of personal photos and home video in digital form. There is a huge demand for new tools and syst ems that enables average users to more efficiently and more effectively process, manage, author and share these digital med ia contents, in particular, a powerful video authoring tool that ca n dramatically reduce the users’ efforts in editing home video. T hough there are many commercial video authoring tools available tod ay, video authoring remains as a tedious and extremely time c onsuming task that often requires trained professional skills. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a novel end-to-end sys tem that enables fast, flexible and personalized video autho ring and sharing. The novel system, called LazyCut, is based on both content analysis techniques and the proposed conten t-aware twolayer authoring templates: content description temp late and content representation template. Moreover, it is d e igned as an open and extensible framework that can support dyna mic update of core components such as content analysis algorit hms, editing methods, and the two-layer authoring templates. Fu rthermore, the two layers of authoring templates separate the vide o authoring from video representation. Once authored with LazyC ut, the video contents can be easily and flexibly represented in other forms according to users’ preference. LazyCut provides a semiautomatic video authoring and sharing system that s ignificantly reduces users’ efforts in video editing while prese ving sufficient flexibility and personalization.