Abstract

In this paper we present a user-centric summarisation system that combines automatic visual-content analysis with user-interface de- sign 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 effec- tively tailored to each individual’s personal need. To this end, we study a number of content analysis techniques to facilitate the efficient compu- tation 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 auto- matic 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 de- sired summary, easy and interactive viewing of the content in terms of a storyboard, and manual refinement of the boundaries of the automat- ically selected video segments in the summary.