Study on requirement specifications for personalized multimedia summarization

The ability to summarize and abstract information will be an essential part of intelligent behavior in consumer devices. However, even for the emerging area of video content analysis, user preferences on summarization have not been explored. This paper reports on a panel which asked: who, why and when summarization is needed; what information should be summarized; and what forms should summaries take. In particular, we investigated the requirements with sensitivity to user needs, user context, media content, device capabilities, and the methods by which user and environment profiles can be assembled and exploited. We organize our findings as a wish list containing four major user questions, and we report the current and near-term states of the art and the major technical challenges in satisfying them. Our study suggests that user preferences should be derived from explicit user statements and from implicit trends inferred from viewing histories and summary usage.