Automatic generation of conference video proceedings

Abstract

How many times did you miss a conference talk in a parallel track and wish you had a second chance to see it? Or you just wanted to see a few talks from a recent conference you did not attend? Video proceedings, which contain videos of all the conference talks, would be of great value in these cases. With recent progress in digital video, streaming technology, large storage, Internet and especially video indexing and retrieval technology, video proceedings finally become a reality. The key challenges are efficient production with minimal labor and easy, intuitive, and rapid user access to talks and thought-for snippet of information. This paper describes an application that allows a nearly automatic, real time creation of video proceedings. All the talks are captured in video, and are automatically indexed by speech recognition and video analysis tools. Free text search in speech and efficient multi-view video browsing are combined with the conference table of contents and speakers biography to make fully searchable and browsable video proceedings. The paper covers the work flow, processing steps, and technical details of the video segmentation, visualization, and user study results. The system was used to produce video proceedings for three local conferences. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.