Aesthetics-Guided Summarization from Multiple User Generated Videos

In recent years, with the rapid development of camera technology and portable devices, we have witnessed a flourish of user generated videos, which are gradually reshaping the traditional professional video oriented media market. The volume of user generated videos in repositories is increasing at a rapid rate. In today's video retrieval systems, a simple query will return many videos which seriously increase the viewing burden. To manage these video retrievals and provide viewers with an efficient way to browse, we introduce a system to automatically generate a summarization from multiple user generated videos and present their salience to viewers in an enjoyable manner. Among multiple consumer videos, we find their qualities to be highly diverse due to various factors such as a photographer's experience or environmental conditions at the time of capture. Such quality inspires us to include a video quality evaluation component into the video summarization since videos with poor qualities can seriously degrade the viewing experience. We first propose a probabilistic model to evaluate the aesthetic quality of each user generated video. This model compares the rich aesthetics information from several well-known photo databases with generic unlabeled consumer videos, under a human perception component indicating the correlation between a video and its constituting frames. Subjective studies were carried out with the results indicating that our method is reliable. Then a novel graph-based formulation is proposed for the multi-video summarization task. Desirable summarization criteria is incorporated as the graph attributes and the problem is solved through a dynamic programming framework. Comparisons with several state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that our algorithm performs better than other methods in generating a skimming video in preserving the essential scenes from the original multiple input videos, with smooth transitions among consecutive segments and appealing aesthetics overall.