The use of a cast to generate person-biased video presentations

This technical report was originally externally published as a defensive publication from an invention disclosure. However it was decided to make the paper easily available to the HP technical community. A video presentation is generated using the specification of a "cast" to direct the emphasis of particular people. It is a simple means of exploiting some additional semantic information obtained using object identification, and can easily be tuned to present many generic stories involving people without any deep semantic knowledge of the actual story. The establishment of a cast allows people-oriented variations of video presentations that are understandable and controllable by a user. Manually establishing the "cast" is a powerful mechanism for controlling the presentation and provides a psychologically important step for a user to establish ownership over the generated presentation.