Anoop Gupta

Automatically extracting highlights for TV Baseball programs

In todays fast-paced world, while the number of channels of television programming available is increasing rapidly, the time available to watch them remains the same or is decreasing. Users desire the capability to watch the programs time-shifted (on-demand) and/or to watch just the highlights to save time. In this paper we explore how to provide for the latter capability, that is the ability to extract highlights automatically, so that viewing time can be reduced. We focus on the sport of baseball as our initial target—it is a very popular sport, the whole game is quite long, and the exciting portions are few. We focus on detecting highlights using audio-track features alone without relying on expensive-to-compute video-track features. We use a combination of generic sports features and baseball-specific features to obtain our results, but believe that may other sports offer the same opportunity and that the techniques presented here will apply to those sports. We present details on relative performance of various learning algorithms, and a probabilistic framework for combining multiple sources of information. We present results comparing output of our algorithms against human-selected highlights for a diverse collection of baseball games with very encouraging results.

Distributed meetings: a meeting capture and broadcasting system

The common meeting is an integral part of everyday life for most workgroups. However, due to travel, time, or other constraints, people are often not able to attend all the meetings they need to. Teleconferencing and recording of meetings can address this problem. In this paper we describe a system that provides these features, as well as a user study evaluation of the system. The system uses a variety of capture devices (a novel 360° camera, a whiteboard camera, an overview camera, and a microphone array) to provide a rich experience for people who want to participate in a meeting from a distance. The system is also combined with speaker clustering, spatial indexing, and time compression to provide a rich experience for people who miss a meeting and want to watch it afterward.

Designing and deploying an information awareness interface

The concept of awareness has received increasing attention over the past several CSCW conferences. Although many awareness interfaces have been designed and studied, most have been limited deployments of research prototypes. In this paper we describe Sideshow, a peripheral awareness interface that was rapidly adopted by thousands of people in our company. Sideshow provides regularly updated peripheral awareness of a broad range of information from virtually any accessible web site or database. We discuss Sideshows design and the experience of refining and redesigning the interface based on feedback from a rapidly expanding user community.

Browsing digital video

Video in digital format played on programmable devices presents opportunities for significantly enhancing the users viewing experience. For example, time compression and pause removal can shorten the viewing time for a video, textual and visual indices can allow personalized navigation through the content, and random-access digital storage allows instantaneous seeks into the content. To understand user behavior when such capabilities are available, we built a software video browsing application that combines many such features. We present results from a user study where users browsed video in six different categories: classroom lectures, conference presentations, entertainment shows, news, sports, and travel. Our results show that the most frequently used features were time compression, pause removal, and navigation using shot boundaries. Also, the behavior was different depending on the content type, and we present a classification. Finally, the users found the browser to be very useful. Two main reasons were: i) the ability to save time and ii) the feeling of control over what content they watched.

Linking public spaces: technical and social issues

Three public spaces frequency used by members of a single organization who are distributed across different floors of two buildings were linked by constantly-running video and audio connections. We discuss the design of the system, including issues in providing low-latency, full-duplex audio-video connectivity, ways to increase possibilities for interaction while addressing privacy concerns, and the introduction of the system to the community. We report on responses to the system and lessions learned, including unexpected issues, such as creative decorations of the spaces and assertions by a vocal minority of employees about the private nature of “public space.”

Notification for shared annotation of digital documents

Notification and shared annotations go hand-in-hand. Notification of activity in a shared document system is known to support awareness and improve asynchronous collaboration, but few studies have examined user needs and explored design tradeoffs. We examined large-scale use of notifications in a commercial system and found it lacking. We designed and deployed enhancements to the system, then conducted a field study to gauge their effect. We found that providing more information in notification messages, supporting multiple communication channels through which notifications can be received, and allowing customization of notification messages are particularly important. Overall awareness of annotation activity on software specifications increased with our enhancements

Automating camera management for lecture room environments

Given rapid improvements in network infrastructure and streaming-media technologies, a large number of corporations and universities are recording lectures and making them available online for anytime, anywhere access. However, producing high-quality lecture videos is still labor intensive and expensive. Fortunately, recent technology advances are making it feasible to build automated camera management systems to capture lectures. In this paper we report on our design, implementation and study of such a system. Compared to previous work-which has tended to be technology centric-we started with interviews with professional video producers and used their knowledge and expertise to create video production rules. We then targeted technology components that allowed us to implement a substantial portion of these rules, including the design of a virtual video director. The systems performance was compared to that of a human operator via a user study. Results suggest that our systems quality in close to that of a human-controlled system. In fact most remote audience members could not tell if the video was produced by a computer or a person.

Automating lecture capture and broadcast: technology and videography

Abstract.Our goal is to help automate the capture and broadcast of lectures to online audiences. Such systems have two interrelated design components. The technology component includes hardware and associated software. The aesthetic component comprises the rules and idioms that human videographers follow to make a video visually engaging; these rules guide hardware placement and software algorithms. We report the design of a complete system that captures and broadcasts lectures automatically and report on a user study and a detailed set of video-production rules obtained from professional videographers who critiqued the system, which has been deployed in our organization for 2 years. We describe how the system can be generalized to a variety of lecture room environments differing in room size and number of cameras. We also discuss gaps between what professional videographers do and what is technologically feasible today.

Building an intelligent camera management system

Given rapid improvements in storage devices, network infrastructure and streaming-media technologies, a large number of corporations and universities are recording lectures and making them available online for anytime, anywhere access. However, producing high-quality lecture videos is still labor intensive and expensive. Fortunately, recent technology advances are making it feasible to build automated camera management systems to capture lectures. In this paper we report our design of such a system, including system configuration, audio-visual tracking techniques, software architecture, and user study. Motivated by different roles in a professional video production team, we have developed a multi-cinematographer single-director camera management system. The system performs lecturer tracking, audience tracking, and video editing all fully automatically, and offers quality close to that of human-operated systems.

Time-compression: systems concerns, usage, and benefits

With the proliferation of online multimedia content and thepopularity of multimedia streaming systems, it is increasinglyuseful to be able to skim and browse multimedia quickly. A keytechnique that enables quick browsing of multimedia istime-compression. Prior research has described how speech can betime-compressed (shortened in duration) while preserving the pitchof the audio. However, client-server systems providing thisfunctionality have not been available. In this paper, we first describe the key tradeoffs faced bydesigners of streaming multimedia systems deployingtime-compression. The implementation tradeoffs primarily impact thegranularity of time-compression supported (discrete vs. continuous)and the latency (wait-time) experienced by users after adjustingdegree of time-compression. We report results of user studiesshowing impact of these factors on the average- compression-rateachieved. We also present data on the usage patterns and benefitsof time compression. Overall, we show significant time-savings forusers and that considerable flexibility is available to thedesigners of client-server streaming systems with timecompression.