Tour Video Paper

The paper I read is called "Creating Map-based Storyboards for Browsing Tour Videos" by Suporn Pongnumkul, Jue Wang, and Michael Cohen. It is over the author's tool to allow people who make videos as they travel places to make a more comprehensive and informative tour guide-like portfolio. The tool takes in the video sequence, and pre-processes it to determine feature points for both quality measurement and identifying coherent shots. This pre-processing then creates a coherence matrix to help pick out the interesting shots that will be used to generate the final set of coherent shots. The authoring part of their program is where the user interface comes in. This is where the user can start creating their storyboard presentation. The third part of the tool is the viewing tool, where the user can view the videos and explore the locations of the scenes.

This sounds like an interesting tool that might make tour video processing much easier. What I liked is that they did a user study of the product (minus the pre-processing, since that would have been harder on the participants), and were well aware of the limitations of their testing. The authors seem to have a good plan for future changes and testing as well. I thought that this would be a great tool to have, if I ever found myself in a position to do something of this sort. However, I'm not sure if they really know whether this tool would be good for basic users, or those not used to working with computers. The participants of the testing were all major computer users. Also, their sample size of 13 seems a little low, but there could have been other limitations that affected this.

The above is the viewing tool of their program.
Below is the viewing tool, which is a web-based interface.

Both images taken from the paper directly. All rights to the writers.