Exploring Video Streams using Slit-Tear Visualizations

Authors

• Anthony Tang
• Saul Greenberg
• Sidney Fels

Short description

Video slicing — a variant of slit scanning in photography — extracts a scan line from a video frame and successively adds that line to a composite image over time. The composite image becomes a time line, where its visual patterns reflect changes in a particular area of the video stream. We extend this idea of video slicing by allowing users to draw marks anywhere on the source video to capture areas of interest. These marks, which we call slit-tears, are used in place of a scan line, and the resulting composite timeline image provides a much richer visualization of the video data. Depending on how tears are placed, they can accentuate motion, small changes, directional movement, and relational patterns.

[Anthony Tang, Saul Greenberg, Sidney Fels, 2008]

Suitable Datatypes

This method can be applied to live video as well as captured AVI files where each frame is either computed seperately or completely in advance, together with its successors. The latter is only relevant to non-live video.

References

[Tang, A., Greenberg, S., and Fels, S., 2008] Exploring Video Streams using Slit-Tear Visualizations. In Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2008). (May 28-30, Napoli, Italy). ACM Press. pp: 191-198.

Demonstrations

iLab Cookbook - Slit Tears: Visualizing Video over Time.