A Social Network Based Collaborative Video Story Composition Platform

There is a large number of videos produced and stored in data repositories on a daily basis. Story-telling is a common use-case for using these videos where a user composes a set of videos together to tell a story, either for learning purposes or sharing experiences. For example, a news editor may search and compose story based on video collected from multiple private and public repositories; an instructor may produce teaching materials using a set of publicly available video clips. Existing search engines have limitation on identifying useful video contents for users with different needs [2]. For a user who attempts to compile a story using a variety of videos, there are a few challenges with existing technologies. A search engine often returns a long list of videos that are relevant to the keywords the user enters into the search engine. How the videos in the list are suitable for the story line requires the user’s further investigation and the amount of work involved often overwhelms the user considering the number of videos returned by a search engine. It is often the case that the highly ranked videos are not the most appropriate ones for a story line under composing. In addition, videos are not organized in a structured manner based on the content, which makes identifying videos that match the story topic difficult and time consuming. Many existing work tackle this problem by integrating textual and visual concepts to group videos [3]. Our method treats story-telling as a collaborative process. It is different to other methods mainly in that we integrate collaborators’ contributions via social networking services to help story-telling. These contributions include adding comments, recommending relevant videos etc. With certain automated information processing, the method can effectively reduce the workload of an individual when composing a story out of a large number of videos from various sources. We assume that the story composer has a number of friends or collaborators who have knowledge on the story and are willing to contribute to the story. It is common in the real world that these people participate in a same event or have mutual interests on the topics of the story. As stories are diverse and the group of people who may be interested in contributing them are dynamic, managing these users with different interests is a challenging problem. We address this problem by leveraging the power of social networks to organize a dynamic group of people for contributing to a story.