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Video Tapestries with Continuous Temporal Zoom

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), August 2010

Connelly Barnes, Dan B Goldman,
Eli Shechtman, Adam Finkelstein
A multiscale tapestry represents an input video as a seamless and zoomable summary image which can be used to navigate through the video. This visualization eliminates hard borders between frames, providing spatial continuity and also continuous zooms to finer temporal resolutions. This figure depicts three discrete scale levels for the film Elephants Dream (Courtesy of the Blender Foundation). The lines between each scale level indicate the corresponding domains between scales. See the video to view the continuous zoom animation between the scales.
Abstract

We present a novel approach for summarizing video in the form of a multiscale image that is continuous in both the spatial domain and across the scale dimension: There are no hard borders between discrete moments in time, and a user can zoom smoothly into the image to reveal additional temporal details. We call these artifacts tapestries because their continuous nature is akin to medieval tapestries and other narrative depictions predating the advent of motion pictures. We propose a set of criteria for such a summarization, and a series of optimizations motivated by these criteria. These can be performed as an entirely offline computation to produce high quality renderings, or by adjusting some optimization parameters the later stages can be solved in real time, enabling an interactive interface for video navigation. Our video tapestries combine the best aspects of two common visualizations, providing the visual clarity of DVD chapter menus with the information density and multiple scales of a video editing timeline representation. In addition, they provide continuous transitions between zoom levels. In a user study, participants preferred both the aesthetics and efficiency of tapestries over other interfaces for visual browsing.
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Citation

Connelly Barnes, Dan B Goldman, Eli Shechtman, and Adam Finkelstein.
"Video Tapestries with Continuous Temporal Zoom."
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH) 29(3), August 2010.

BibTeX

@article{Barnes:2010:VTW,
   author = "Connelly Barnes and Dan B Goldman and Eli Shechtman and Adam Finkelstein",
   title = "Video Tapestries with Continuous Temporal Zoom",
   journal = "ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH)",
   year = "2010",
   month = aug,
   volume = "29",
   number = "3"
}