Video Carving

We present a technique for summarizing a video into a short segment, while preserving the important events in the original. While many techniques remove whole frames from the video stream when condensing it, we observe that these deleted frames need not come from a single time step. More generally, deleted frames are “sheets” through the space-time volume. This leads to an algorithm whereby sheets are incrementally carved from the video cube to shorten the length of a video. The problem of finding these sheets is formulated as a min-cut problem, whose solution can be mapped to a sheet. We show results by creating short, viewable summaries of long video sequences.