Automatic Composition Techniques for Video Production

Video production involves the process of capturing, editing, and composing video segments for delivery to a consumer. A composition must yield a coherent presentation of an event or narrative. This process can be automated if appropriate domain-specific metadata are associated with video segments and composition techniques are established. Automation leads to the support of dynamic composition and customization for applications such as news on demand. In this paper we present techniques to achieve dynamic, real-time, and cohesive video composition and customization. We also identify metrics for evaluation our techniques with respect to existing manually-produced video-based news. The results of such an evaluation show that the quality of automatic composition is comparable to, and in some cases, better than, broadcast news video composition. The results also validate the assertions on which the automatic composition techniques are based.