A User Interface Design for Acquiring Statistics from Video

Man-Kang Leung and Chi-Wing Fu

in International Journal of Image and Graphics, to appear, 2007

Abstract

This paper introduces a graphical user interface approach to facilitate an efficient and timely generation of statistic data from input videos. By means of a carefully-designed graphical user interface, users can interactively add in various kinds of markers, known as the statistic inducers, on the screen of an input video to specify the areas of interest corresponding to the locations of relevant events. These inducers are in the form of two-dimensional points, lines, polygons, and grids, and can be put on the video screen with great ease. Using these inducers, we not only can efficiently customize the system for a given statistic generation task; in addition, we can also precisely constrain the time-consuming space-time video analysis process (as well as any additional analysis process like optical flow computation or object recognition) on the user-specified areas. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, we developed a prototypic system and experimented it in two different statistic generation cases: dormitory light switching and road traffic. In both cases, we just need a few minutes of UI customization time to set up the inducers; once this is done, timely statistics can be automatically generated subsequently.


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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank C.-K. Tang for his advice in video analysis, Shirley Ng for implementing the video capture component, and Felix Lo for composing the companion video.