Efficient Layout of Comic-Like Video Summaries

Abstract

In order to represent large amounts of information in the form of a video key-frame summary, this paper studies narrative grammar of comics, and using its universal and intuitive rules, lays out visual summaries in an efficient and user centered way. The system ranks importance of key-frame sizes in the final layout by balancing the dominant visual representability and discovery of unanticipated content utilizing a specific cost function and an unsupervised robust spectral clustering technique. A final layout is created using an optimization algorithm based on dynamic programming. Algorithm efficiency and robustness are demonstrated by comparing the results with the optimal panelling solutions.