Musical slideshow: boosting user experience in photo presentation

Abstract

With the advance of digital acquisition and storage technology, people got used to take photos at will and to record almost any event with (many) photos. However, large amounts of photos without appropriate organization for access and consumption raise several potential problems, reducing the users’ quality of experience. Therefore, to facilitate an effective photo selection and organization process making the consumption process more enjoyable, it is useful to develop advanced image analysis and presentation tools, eventually integrating also some music content in a synchronized way, to further boost the photo presentation user experience. As people’s time is getting more precious and scarce, the availability of applications able to automatically generate a musical slideshow as a pleasant way to consume large amounts of photos is highly desirable. In this context, this paper describes the context and motivation for the development of a musical slideshow application, the architecture designed and the entire signal processing flow implemented. To assess the performance of this multimedia application, a user evaluation methodology was designed and applied with promising results, showing that the developed application is able to create entertaining and efficient photo presentation experiences.