Video Visualization for Compact Presentation of Pictorial Content

Digital libraries are likely to be accessible on distributed networks which means that the data are subject to network congestion and bandwidth constraints. To enable digital library technologies, it is not only important to develop tools to present the essence of the content by analyzing video to let the user browse, view the queried results, formulate better searches, and get an understanding of the material presented to him, but also to deliver the material without noticeable network delay. It is thus important to be able to present compactly the video content while retaining the essence of the story. Video visualization describes the process of analyzing video to derive representative graphics for presenting the essence of the content. In this paper, we propose techniques to analyze video to extract important information, and, to build a compact pictorial summary for visual presentation of the content from the analysis results. A video sequence is thus condensed into a few images - each summarizing the dramatic incident taking place in a meaningful segment of the video. In particular, we present techniques to differentiate the dominance of the cotent in subdivisions of the segment, select a graphic layout pattern according to the relative dominances, and create a set of video posters, each of which is compact, visually pleasant and intuitive representation of the story content. The collection of video posters arranged in temporal order then forms a pictorial summary of the sequence to tell the underlying story. The work has significant implications for enabling video browsing, query, search and retrieval applications, especially over...