SmartPlayer: User-Centric Video Fast-Forwarding

Kai-Yin Cheng, et. al., National Taiwan University

Summary

A new video interaction model allows video players to adaptively fast forward through mundane stretched of video while ensuring no areas of interest are missed.

Details

Techniques of still image abstraction and video skimming try to summarise a video but face disadvantages in not being able to present to user finer details of areas they are interested in and ensuring nothing is missed out from the summary. Author’s SmartPlayer performs video skimming but instead of skipping, fast forwards ‘dull patches’. A user study was performed to find following user expectations about playback speed and base the SmartPlayer video flow on:

• constant, when video is ‘interesting’.
• changes gradually only.
• changes based on minutes of viewed footage.

Based on these, SmartPlayer has a motion and semantic layer to achieve video skimming. While motion layer adapts the playback rate, semantic layer detects predefined semantic events in the video. Personalization layer keeps track of user’s video browsing history. Based on user testing, it was found that SmartPlayer was quite useful in long, predictable videos with understandable characteristics and where audio was of secondary importance in nature.

Review

How many times does it happen with you that you have to fast forward through hours long wedding video to go through those ‘special moments’. Chances are a lot many times and this technique promises that those are going to be days in past. The technique proposed in this video sounds quite intuitive and it is only surprising that no one has thought of it before. It almost sounds like MPEG equivalent in terms of time spaced in viewing a video just like an MPEG would save on space used when a video frame does not change a lot over time.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at CHI 2009 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.