Subjective Assessment of Consumer Video Summarization

The immediate availability of a vast amount of multimedia content has created a growing need for improvements in the field of content analysis and summarization. While researchers have been rapidly making contributions and improvements to the field, we must never forget that content analysis and summarization themselves are not the user’s goals. Users’ primary interests fall into one of two categories; they normally either want to be entertained or want to be informed (or both). Summarization is therefore just another tool for improving the entertainment value or the information gathering value of the video watching experience. In this paper, we first explore the relationship between the viewer, the interface, and the summarization algorithms. Through an understanding of the user’s goals and concerns, we present means for measuring the success summarization tools. Guidelines for the successful use of summarization in consumer video devices are also discussed.