Abstract

Given the enormous growth in user-generated videos, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to navigate them effificiently. As these videos are generally of poor quality, summarization methods designed for well-produced videos do not generalize to them. To address this challenge, we propose to use web-images as a prior to facilitate summarization of user-generated videos. Our main intuition is that people tend to take pictures of objects to capture them in a maximally informative way. Such images could therefore be used as prior information to summarize videos containing a similar set of objects. In this work, we apply our novel insight to develop a summarization algorithm that uses the web-image based prior information in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, to automatically evaluate summarization algorithms on a large scale, we propose a framework that relies on multiple summaries obtained through crowdsourcing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our evaluation framework by comparing its performance to that of multiple human evaluators. Finally, we present results for our framework tested on hundreds of user-generated videos