Video collections in panoramic contexts

Abstract

Figure 1: Panoramas are widely available online, and more and more video content of these places is shared online. With these data, our video-collection+context interface visualizes the dynamic changes within a collection. The right-hand side shows our spatio-temporal index as a heat map (left), inlayed video foci (center), and fast search with spatial mouse scrubbing (right). ABSTRACTVideo collections of places show contrasts and changes in our world, but current interfaces to video collections make it hard for users to explore these changes. Recent state-of-the-art interfaces attempt to solve this problem for 'outside→in' collections, but cannot connect 'inside→out' collections of the same place which do not visually overlap. We extend the focus+context paradigm to create a video-collections+context interface by embedding videos into a panorama. We build a spatio-temporal index and tools for fast exploration of the space and time of the video collection. We demonstrate the flexibility of our representation with interfaces for desktop and mobile flat displays, and for a spherical display with joypad and tablet controllers. We study with users the effect of our video-collection+context system to spatio-temporal localization tasks, and find significant improvements to accuracy and completion time in visual search tasks compared to existing systems. We measure the usability of our interface with System Usability Scale (SUS) and task-specific questionnaires, and find our system scores higher.

Progressive Refinement Imaging

“…While these works circumvent the challenge of creating a seamless reconstruction, the use of unstructured collections of photographs, similar to our approach, requires robust alignment of uncalibrated photographs. Further work in this direction demonstrates the exploration of video collections within the panoramic context of the same place [TPS*13] and the embedding of video clips within gigapixel scale imagery [PCD*12].…”

PanoSwarm: Collaborative and Synchronized Multi-Device Panoramic Photography

“…Looking At You [10] is an interface using mobile sensors such as gyroscopes and face tracking to help users view large imagery on mobile devices. Videos can also be integrated within panoramic contexts, providing a browsing experience across both the temporal and spatial dimensions [15]. However, none of the works addresses collaborative capturing or the ghosting artifacts in the panoramas.…”

Device effect on panoramic video+context tasks

“…Pece et al [22] find that scene understanding is improved as more of the panorama gains a temporal dimension. Tompkin et al [37] demonstrate that panoramic video representations improve spatial and temporal understanding when compared to existing video collection exploration interfaces. However, to our knowledge, nobody has investigated whether different devices can affect task performance for panoramic video imagery.…”

“…Panoramas are exploited for surveillance and collaborative telepresence applications, where spatial understanding of the scene is critical [14,18,22]. Furthermore, novel interfaces for exploring video collections extend spatial reasoning to include temporal reasoning [23,37].…”