Compact Video Synopsis via Global Spatiotemporal Optimization

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 19; no. 10; pp. 1664 - 1676
• Main Authors: Nie, Yongwei, Xiao, Chunxia, Sun, Hanqiu, Li, Ping
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.10.2013; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Collisions; Condensing; Context; Multilevel; Optimization; patch relocation; Preserves; Relocation; Space vehicles; Spatiotemporal phenomena; Surveillance; Trajectory; Video synopsis; Visualization
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2012.176

Video synopsis aims at providing condensed representations of video data sets that can be easily captured from digital cameras nowadays, especially for daily surveillance videos. Previous work in video synopsis usually moves active objects along the time axis, which inevitably causes collisions among the moving objects if compressed much. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for compact video synopsis using a unified spatiotemporal optimization. Our approach globally shifts moving objects in both spatial and temporal domains, which shifting objects temporally to reduce the length of the video and shifting colliding objects spatially to avoid visible collision artifacts. Furthermore, using a multilevel patch relocation (MPR) method, the moving space of the original video is expanded into a compact background based on environmental content to fit with the shifted objects. The shifted objects are finally composited with the expanded moving space to obtain the high-quality video synopsis, which is more condensed while remaining free of collision artifacts. Our experimental results have shown that the compact video synopsis we produced can be browsed quickly, preserves relative spatiotemporal relationships, and avoids motion collisions.