Automatically Creating Adaptive Video Summaries Using Constraint Satisfaction Programming: Application to Sport Content

Abstract

This paper addresses automatic video summarization. We propose a novel approach that relies on constraint satisfaction programming (CSP). An expert defines the general rules for summary generation. These rules are written as constraints. The (final) user can define additional constraints or enter high-level parameters of predefined constraints. This has many advantages. It clearly separates summary generation rules from the summary generation algorithm (the CSP solver here). The summary can hence be modified without reviewing the whole generation process. It also allows users to adapt the summary to the target application and to their preferences. The proposed approach is mainly dedicated to edited professional video (like TV programs). It has been extensively evaluated not only using objective measures but also through a large-scale user evaluation. This evaluation involved more than 60 people. Experiments have been performed within the challenging application of tennis match automatic summarization, using about 28.5 h of videos.