Michel M. Silva

Daniel Louzada Fernandes, Marcos Henrique Fonseca Ribeiro, Fabio Ribeiro Cerqueira et al.

Several services for people with visual disabilities have emerged recently due to achievements in Assistive Technologies and Artificial Intelligence areas. Despite the growth in assistive systems availability, there is a lack of services that support specific tasks, such as understanding the image context presented in online content, e.g., webinars. Image captioning techniques and their variants are limited as Assistive Technologies as they do not match the needs of visually impaired people when generating specific descriptions. We propose an approach for generating context of webinar images combining a dense captioning technique with a set of filters, to fit the captions in our domain, and a language model for the abstractive summary task. The results demonstrated that we can produce descriptions with higher interpretability and focused on the relevant information for that group of people by combining image analysis methods and neural language models.

Michel Melo Silva, Washington Luis Souza Ramos, Mario Fernando Montenegro Campos et al.

Technological advances in sensors have paved the way for digital cameras to become increasingly ubiquitous, which, in turn, led to the popularity of the self-recording culture. As a result, the amount of visual data on the Internet is moving in the opposite direction of the available time and patience of the users. Thus, most of the uploaded videos are doomed to be forgotten and unwatched stashed away in some computer folder or website. In this paper, we address the problem of creating smooth fast-forward videos without losing the relevant content. We present a new adaptive frame selection formulated as a weighted minimum reconstruction problem. Using a smoothing frame transition and filling visual gaps between segments, our approach accelerates first-person videos emphasizing the relevant segments and avoids visual discontinuities. Experiments conducted on controlled videos and also on an unconstrained dataset of First-Person Videos (FPVs) show that, when creating fast-forward videos, our method is able to retain as much relevant information and smoothness as the state-of-the-art techniques, but in less processing time.

Alan Carvalho Neves, Michel Melo Silva, Mario Fernando Montenegro Campos et al.

The growing data sharing and life-logging cultures are driving an unprecedented increase in the amount of unedited First-Person Videos. In this paper, we address the problem of accessing relevant information in First-Person Videos by creating an accelerated version of the input video and emphasizing the important moments to the recorder. Our method is based on an attention model driven by gaze and visual scene analysis that provides a semantic score of each frame of the input video. We performed several experimental evaluations on publicly available First-Person Videos datasets. The results show that our methodology can fast-forward videos emphasizing moments when the recorder visually interact with scene components while not including monotonous clips.

Washington L. S. Ramos, Michel M. Silva, Edson R. Araujo et al.

The growth of Social Networks has fueled the habit of people logging their day-to-day activities, and long First-Person Videos (FPVs) are one of the main tools in this new habit. Semantic-aware fast-forward methods are able to decrease the watch time and select meaningful moments, which is key to increase the chances of these videos being watched. However, these methods can not handle semantics in terms of personalization. In this work, we present a new approach to automatically creating personalized fast-forward videos for FPVs. Our approach explores the availability of text-centric data from the user's social networks such as status updates to infer her/his topics of interest and assigns scores to the input frames according to her/his preferences. Extensive experiments are conducted on three different datasets with simulated and real-world users as input, achieving an average F1 score of up to 12.8 percentage points higher than the best competitors. We also present a user study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Michel Melo Silva, Washington Luis Souza Ramos, Felipe Cadar Chamone et al.

The emergence of low-cost high-quality personal wearable cameras combined with the increasing storage capacity of video-sharing websites have evoked a growing interest in first-person videos, since most videos are composed of long-running unedited streams which are usually tedious and unpleasant to watch. State-of-the-art semantic fast-forward methods currently face the challenge of providing an adequate balance between smoothness in visual flow and the emphasis on the relevant parts. In this work, we present the Multi-Importance Fast-Forward (MIFF), a fully automatic methodology to fast-forward egocentric videos facing these challenges. The dilemma of defining what is the semantic information of a video is addressed by a learning process based on the preferences of the user. Results show that the proposed method keeps over $3$ times more semantic content than the state-of-the-art fast-forward. Finally, we discuss the need of a particular video stabilization technique for fast-forward egocentric videos.