LazyCut: Content-Aware Template Based Media Authoring

The rapid adoption of digital cameras and camcorders leads to an explosive growth of personal photos and home video in digital form. There is a huge demand for new tools and systems that enables average users to more efficiently and more effectively process, manage, author and share these digital media contents, in particular, a powerful video authoring tool that can dramatically reduce the users’ efforts in editing home video. Though there are many commercial video authoring tools available today, video authoring remains as a tedious and extremely time consuming task that often requires trained professional skills. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a novel end-to-end system that enables fast, flexible and personalized video authoring and sharing. The novel system, called LazyCut, is based on both content analysis techniques and the proposed content-aware two-layer authoring templates: content description template and content representation template. Moreover, it is designed as an open and extensible framework that can support dynamic update of core components such as content analysis algorithms, editing methods, and the two-layer authoring templates. Furthermore, the two layers of authoring templates separate the video authoring from video representation. Once authored with LazyCut, the video contents can be easily and flexibly represented in other forms according to users’ preference. LazyCut provides a semi-automatic video authoring and sharing system that significantly reduces users’ efforts in video editing while preserving sufficient flexibility and personalization.