Upgrade & Performance Evaluation of Video Frame Ranking Toolbox

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User Study Software

Purpose

To let users easily make summaries of videos manually. 

Features

The user can open an MPEG clip, view it at frame rate, select individual frames by clicking in order to add the selected frames as thumbnails to a storyboard. Frames added to the storyboard can be deleted at any time. In the user study (to be started in the beginning of this quarter), the user is asked to build storyboards that best summarize short videos with no sound. For each clip, storyboards containing specific numbers of thumbnails are requested to the user. The storyboard can also be replayed at the required rate and saved for later use.

Snapshot

Settings

User can specify the length of storyboard in one of the following forms:

1) As number of thumbnail images / frames OR

2) As percentage of total frames

Inter-frame time interval for the storyboard playback can also be specified.

Output

The software saves: 

1) the zero based indices of the selected frames in a text file

2) storyboard in a binary file. For long movies, user can complete the task of building the story board in multiple sessions.  The software has the provision to store multiple storyboard (binary) files, corresponding to different setting, for each MPEG. After opening a MPEG file, the user is prompted to select one of the existing storyboards or create a new.

Pending Issue

The software uses Windows Media Player, as an ActiveX component, for video browsing. The frames of interest are copied on the storyboard via clipboard. After opening a MPEG file, sometimes the clipboard mechanism fails. This is an inconsistent problem. It occurs only when the user attempts to select the first frame after starting the application. The workaround is to: 1) close the file (not the application) 2) Go to Explorer and single click  any MPEG file to see the preview in Media Player. 3) Press "Print Screen" key on the keyboard.

This looks like a generic Windows problem because it can also be observed by doing following steps:

1) Open a MPEG file in Media Player

2) Press the "Print Screen" key to copy entire screen, as a image on the clipboard

3) Open any imaging application viz. Microsoft Paint

4) Paste the image from clipboard

You may find that the entire screen is pasted properly, except the portion where video is being displayed (comes as black). This is also an inconsistent behavior. 

For problems or questions regarding this web contact [Ayesh Mahajan].
Last updated: January 14, 2003.