Video Browsing Using Interactive Navigation Summaries

A new approach for interactive video browsing is described. The novelty of the proposed approach is the flexible concept of interactive navigation summaries. Similar to time sliders, commonly used with standard soft video players, navigation summaries allow random access to a video. In addition, they also provide abstract visualizations of the content at a user-defined level of detail and, thus, quickly communicate content characteristics to the user. Navigation summaries can provide visual information about both low-level features but even high-level features. The concept fully integrates the user, who knows best which navigation summary at which level of detail could be most beneficial for his/her current video browsing task, and provide him/her a flexible set of navigation means. A first user study has shown that our approach can significantly outperform standard soft video players - the state-of-the art "poor man's" video browsing tool.