Creating and sharing personalized time-based annotations of videos on the web

Abstract

This paper introduces a multimedia document model that can structure community comments about media. In particular, we describe a set of temporal transformations for multimedia documents that allow end-users to create and share personalized timed-text comments on third party videos. The benefit over current approaches lays in the usage of a rich captioning format that is not embedded into a specific video encoding format. Using as example a Web-based video annotation tool, this paper describes the possibility of merging video clips from different video providers into a logical unit to be captioned, and tailoring the annotations to specific friends or family members. In addition, the described transformations allow for selective viewing and navigation through temporal links, based on end-users' comments. We also report on a predictive timing model for synchronizing unstructured comments with specific events within a video(s). The contributions described in this paper bring significant implications to be considered in the analysis of rich media social networking sites and the design of next generation video annotation tools.

ActiveTimesheets

“…Another line of approaches consist in augmenting HTML with timing functionality (e.g. XHTML+SMIL [18], smilText-JS [9] and Timesheets.js [4]). An advantage of this approach is that an author can take full benefit of the HTML syntax, while applying a temporal model to the document.…”

“…The Timesheets.js [4] API provides an experimental opera- tion to directly edit the timegraph, in this case restricted to addition (but not removal or updates) of time container nodes. Directly editing the rendering structures is also performed by the Ambulant Annotator tool [9], but the operations are restricted to those required for captioning single videos using smilText. A more robust and author-friendly approach consists of, similarly to NCL, providing every editing operation in the authoring syntax (e.g.…”

“…Even though continuous media streams can be included via specific tags, there are very limited resources to declaratively specify the temporal layout of a group of media elements. As an alternative to provide richer layouts, several authors have proposed the integration of multimedia authoring languages in the HTML5 technology stack [13,6,14,18,9,12]. The SMIL Timesheets [21] (or simply Timesheets) language, a derivative of SMIL [19], stands out among these approaches since it includes an expressive temporal model and it provides reasonable decoupling between spatial and temporal layouts.…”

Socially-aware multimedia authoring

“…Video commenting has been dealt with in many ways, ranging from the usage of models that are not timed (e.g., HTML) or are unstructured (e.g., Flash) to standards such as MPEG-7 [1] and NCL [33]. Based on our analysis [62], we rely on SMIL 3.0 [17] as the basic framework that meets our requirements. First, we create a structured multimedia document around an input video(s).…”

A method to support accessible video authoring

“…However, they used four paradigms: structured, timeline, graph and scripting. Guimarães, Cesar and Bulterman (2010) developed a multimedia document model which allows end-users to create and share comments on third party videos. Meixner et al (2014) developed an authoring tool for the enrichment of video content with annotations and described an iterative process for improving the usability of the authoring tool.…”