Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

Konstantinos Chorianopoulos, Vassiliki Tsaknaki

We explore the design of a seamless broadcast communication system that brings together the distributed community of remote secondary education schools. In contrast to higher education, primary and secondary education establishments should remain distributed, in order to maintain a balance of urban and rural life in the developing and the developed world. We plan to deploy an ambient and social interactive TV platform (physical installation, authoring tools, interactive content) that supports social communication in a positive way. In particular, we present the physical design and the conceptual model of the system.

Ioannis Leftheriotis, Chrysoula Gkonela, Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

In this paper, we propose a user-based video indexing method, that automatically generates thumbnails of the most important scenes of an online video stream, by analyzing users' interactions with a web video player. As a test bench to verify our idea we have extended the YouTube video player into the VideoSkip system. In addition, VideoSkip uses a web-database (Google Application Engine) to keep a record of some important parameters, such as the timing of basic user actions (play, pause, skip). Moreover, we implemented an algorithm that selects representative thumbnails. Finally, we populated the system with data from an experiment with nine users. We found that the VideoSkip system indexes video content by leveraging implicit users interactions, such as pause and thirty seconds skip. Our early findings point toward improvements of the web video player and its thumbnail generation technique. The VideSkip system could compliment content-based algorithms, in order to achieve efficient video-indexing in difficult videos, such as lectures or sports.

Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

Video search results and suggested videos on web sites are represented with a video thumbnail, which is manually selected by the video up-loader among three randomly generated ones (e.g., YouTube). In contrast, we present a grounded user-based approach for automatically detecting interesting key-frames within a video through aggregated users' replay interactions with the video player. Previous research has focused on content-based systems that have the benefit of analyzing a video without user interactions, but they are monolithic, because the resulting video thumbnails are the same regardless of the user preferences. We constructed a user interest function, which is based on aggregate video replays, and analyzed hundreds of user interactions. We found that the local maximum of the replaying activity stands for the semantics of information rich videos, such as lecture, and how-to. The concept of user-based key-frame detection could be applied to any video on the web, in order to generate a user-based and dynamic video thumbnail in search results.