A system for event-based film browsing

The recent past has seen a proliferation in the amount of digital video content being created and consumed. This is perhaps being driven by the increase in audiovisual quality, as well as the ease with which production, reproduction and consumption is now possible. The widespread use of digital video, as opposed its analogue counterpart, has opened up a plethora of previously impossible applications. This paper builds upon previous work that analysed digital video, namely movies, in order to facilitate presentation in an easily navigable manner. A film browsing interface, termed the MovieBrowser, is described, which allows users to easily locate specific portions of movies, as well as to obtain an understanding of the filming being perused. A number of experiments which assess the system’s performance are also presented

Automatic indexing of video content via the detection of semantic events

The number, and size, of digital video databases is continuously growing. Unfortunately, most, if not all, of the video content in these databases is stored without any sort of indexing or analysis and without any associated metadata. If any of the videos do have metadata, then it is usually the result of some manual annotation process rather than any automatic indexing. Thus, locating clips and browsing content is difficult, time consuming and generally inefficient. The task of automatically indexing movies is particularly difficult given their innovative creation process and the individual style of many film makers. However, there are a number of underlying film grammar conventions that are universally followed, from a Hollywood blockbuster to an underground movie with a limited budget. These conventions dictate many elements of film making such as camera placement and editing. By examining the use of these conventions it is possible to extract information about the events in a movie. This research aims to provide an approach that creates an indexed version of a movie to facilitate ease of browsing and efficient retrieval. In order to achieve this aim, all of the relevant events contained within a movie are detected and classified into a predefined index. The event detection process involves examining the underlying structure of a movie and utilising audiovisual analysis techniques, supported by machine learning algorithms, to extract information based on this structure. The result is an indexed movie that can be presented to users for browsing/retrieval of relevant events, as well as supporting user specified searching. Extensive evaluation of the indexing approach is carried out. This evaluation indicates efficient performance of the event detection and retrieval system, and also highlights the subjective nature of video content

Designing an interface for a digital movie browsing system in the film studies domain

This article explains our work in designing an interface for a digital movie browsing system in the specific application context of film studies. The development of MOVIEBROWSER2 follows some general design guidelines based on an earlier user study with film studies students at Dublin City University. These design guidelines have been used as an input to the MOVIEBROWSER2 system design. The rationale for the interface design decisions has been elaborated. An experiment has been carried out among film studies student, together with a one-semester trial deployment. The results show positive feedback and a better performance in the students’ essay outcome with higher perceived satisfaction level

Exploring the usage of a video application tool: Experiences in film studies

This paper explores our experiences in deploying a video application tool in film studies, and its evaluation in terms of realistic contextual end-users who have real tasks to perform in a real environment. We demonstrate our experiences and core lesson learnt in deploying our novel movie browser application with undergraduate and graduate students completing a Film Studies course in Dublin City University over a semester. We developed a system called MOVIEBROWSER2 that has two types of browsing modes: Advanced and Basic. In general, students found that the features we provided were beneficial for their studies. Some issues or mismatches arose during the trial. A ‘wish-list’ was drawn up that might be useful for the future system developer. The contribution and achievements reported in this article are on the demonstration and exploration of how advances in technology can be deployed, and media can be accessed in the context of a real user community. Exploring the usage indicates a positive acceptance among students, besides lessons learned that are important for further investigation

Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach

Developing, deploying and assessing usage of a movie archive system among students of film studies

This paper describes our work in developing a movie browser application for students of Film Studies at our University. The aim of our work is to address the issues that arise when applying conventional user-centered design techniques from the usability engineering field to build a usable application when the system incorporates novel multimedia tools that could be potentially useful to the end-users but have not yet been practiced or deployed. We developed a web-based system that incorporates features as identified from the students and those features from our novel video analysis tools, including scene detection and classification. We deployed the system, monitored usage and gathered quantitative and qualitative data. Our findings show those expected patterns and highlighted issues that need to be further investigated in a novel application development. A mismatch between the users’ wishes at the interviews and their actual usage was noted. In general, students found most of the provided features were beneficial for their studies

Developing a MovieBrowser for supporting analysis and browsing of movie content

There is a growing awareness of the importance of system evaluation directly with end-users in realistic environments, and as a result some novel applications have been deployed to the real world and evaluated in trial contexts. While this is certainly a desirable trend to relate a technical system to a real user-oriented perspective, most of these efforts do not involve end-user participation right from the start of the development, but only after deploying it. In this paper we describe our research in designing, deploying and assessing the impact of a web-based tool that incorporates multimedia techniques to support movie analysis and browsing for students of film studies. From the very start and throughout the development we utilize methodologies from usability engineering in order to feed in end-user needs and thus tailoring the underlying technical system to those needs. Starting by capturing real users’ current practices and matching them to the available technical elements of the system, we deployed an initial version of our system to University classes for a semester during which we obtained an extensive amount of rich usage data. We describe the process and some of the findings from this trial

Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach

Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach

An examination of automatic video retrieval technology on access to the contents of an historical video archive

Purpose – This paper aims to provide an initial understanding of the constraints that historical video collections pose to video retrieval technology and the potential that online access offers to both archive and users. Design/methodology/approach – A small and unique collection of videos on customs and folklore was used as a case study. Multiple methods were employed to investigate the effectiveness of technology and the modality of user access. Automatic keyframe extraction was tested on the visual content while the audio stream was used for automatic classification of speech and music clips. The user access (search vs browse) was assessed in a controlled user evaluation. A focus group and a survey provided insight on the actual use of the analogue archive. The results of these multiple studies were then compared and integrated (triangulation). Findings – The amateur material challenged automatic techniques for video and audio indexing, thus suggesting that the technology must be tested against the material before deciding on a digitisation strategy. Two user interaction modalities, browsing vs searching, were tested in a user evaluation. Results show users preferred searching, but browsing becomes essential when the search engine fails in matching query and indexed words. Browsing was also valued for serendipitous discovery; however the organisation of the archive was judged cryptic and therefore of limited use. This indicates that the categorisation of an online archive should be thought of in terms of users who might not understand the current classification. The focus group and the survey showed clearly the advantage of online access even when the quality of the video surrogate is poor. The evidence gathered suggests that the creation of a digital version of a video archive requires a rethinking of the collection in terms of the new medium: a new archive should be specially designed to exploit the potential that the digital medium offers. Similarly, users' needs have to be considered before designing the digital library interface, as needs are likely to be different from those imagined. Originality/value – This paper is the first attempt to understand the advantages offered and limitations held by video retrieval technology for small video archives like those often found in special collections