Webcam Synopsis: Peeking Around the World

The world is covered with millions of Webcams, many transmit everything in their field of view over the Internet 24 hours a day. A Web search finds public webcams in airports, intersections, classrooms, parks, shops, ski resorts, and more. Even more private surveillance cameras cover many private and public facilities. Webcams are an endless resource, but most of the video broadcast will be of little interest due to lack of activity. We propose to generate a short video that will be a synopsis of an endless video streams, generated by webcams or surveillance cameras. We would like to address queries like "I would like to watch in one minute the highlights of this camera broadcast during the past day". The process includes two major phases: (i) An online conversion of the video stream into a database of objects and activities (rather than frames), (ii) A response phase, generating the video synopsis as a response to the user's query. To include maximum information in a short synopsis we simultaneously show activities that may have happened at different times. The synopsis video can also be used as an index into the original video stream.