Segmenting and Summarizing General Events in a Long-Term Lifelog

Lifelogging aims to capture a person’s life experiences using digital devices. When captured over an extended period of time a lifelog can potentially contain millions of files from various sources in a range of formats. For lifelogs containing such massive numbers of items, we believe it is important to group them into meaningful sets and summarize them, so that users can search and browse their lifelog data efficiently. Existing studies have explored the segmentation of continuously captured images over short periods of at most a few days into small groups of “events” (episodes). Yet, for long-term lifelogs, higher levels of abstraction are desirable due to the very large number of “events” which will occur over an extended period. We aim to segment a long-term lifelog at the level of general events which typically extend beyond a daily boundary, and to select summary information to represent these events. We describe our current work on higher level segmentation and summary information extraction for long term life logs and report a preliminary pilot study on a real long-term lifelog collection.