Webcam Synopsis: Peeking Around the World

The world is covered with millions of webcams. Some are private, but many transmit everything in their field of view over the internet 24 hours a day. A web search finds public webcams in airports, intersections, classrooms, parks, shops, ski resorts, and more. These public webcams are an endless resource, and some sites are already mapping them by location or by functionality. But when a webcam is selected - most of the video broadcast will be of no interest due to lack of activity. We propose to generate a short video that will be a synopsis of an infinite video stream, such as generated by a webcam. We would like to address queries like "I would like to watch in one minute the highlights of this camera broadcast during the past day". The two major phases are: (i) An online conversion of the video stream into a searchable structure based on objects and activities (rather than frames). (ii) A response phase, generating the video synopsis as a response to the user's que...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Yael Pritch, Alex Rav-Acha, Avital Gutman, Shmuel Peleg
• Keywords: Computer Vision, ICCV 2007, Infinite Video Stream, Original Video Stream, Synopsis Video, Video Stream, Video Synopsis