Method and system for browsing, searching and sharing of personal video by a non-parametric approach

Abstract

A method for determining a predictability of a media entity portion, the method includes: receiving or generating (a) reference media descriptors, and (b) probability estimations of descriptor space representatives given the reference media descriptors; wherein the descriptor space representatives are representative of a set of media entities; and calculating a predictability score of the media entity portion based on at least (a) the probability estimations of the descriptor space representatives given the reference media descriptors, and (b) relationships between the media entity portion descriptors and the descriptor space representatives.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13 / 041,457, filed on Mar. 7, 2011, which claims the priority of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61 / 311,524, filed on Mar. 8, 2010, which is incorporated herein by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]In recent years, there has been an explosion of visual information including personal images and video. Personal cameras today are affordable and portable, and enable shooting video either as portable camcorder (e.g., Flip), pocket still camera and camera-phones (e.g., iPhone). This enhanced portability and increased ease of use enable people to shoot video casually at any occasion. This creates an exponential growth in the amount of generated personal video. Although people are shooting more and more video, there is not a matching increase in the amount of viewing or sharing of personal video.[0003]The internet video revolution has made a considerable impact...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

This approach provides a unified solution for browsing, searching, and editing personal video, enhancing user experience by making personal video more accessible and shareable, reducing storage and bandwidth costs, and increasing user engagement.

Problems solved by technology

Although people are shooting more and more video, there is not a matching increase in the amount of viewing or sharing of personal video.

Personal video is left without any real comprehensive solution and thus viewing and sharing personal video is very limited.

In contrast to other kinds of internet video, personal video is initially very raw and boring and thus not suitable for watching or sharing.

In addition, personal video is completely unstructured, and thus can only be browsed primitively (manual forward-backward).

Lastly, personal video does not contain meaningful meta-data and therefore cannot be searched.

These problems, which create a poor user experience stand in contrast to other videos in the internet (e.g., viral video in YouTube), which can be searched, browsed and shared.

When compared to other kinds of internet video, personal video has an inherent problem that each personal video has a very small cycle of interest (few friends and family).

As a result, the few viewers of each such video will not supply enough textual information and meta-data to enable textual mining engines (e.g., Google).

Thus, while other forms of internet video gain a significant amount of textual meta-data from viewers, personal video remains raw and mostly non usable.

In addition, personal video is mostly not edited and not produced, which creates huge files with boring content.

As a result, besides being difficult to transmit, share and upload their required bandwidth and storage space is expensive relative to the minimal or zero amount of viewing they can generate.

While there are many partial, ad hoc solutions to the problem of browsing, searching and sharing of personal video there is no single unified solution for handling this problem.

Due to the magnitude of the problem and the large number of required modules, any practical system for solving this problem, which uses many ad hoc solutions, would be extremely complicated, inflexible and not scalable.

However, partial solutions to this problem are inadequate: For instance, without being able to automatically edit and produce personal video, users would not be interested to share the raw footage, which eliminates one of the main drivers for using personal video.

Without searching capabilities, and considering the exponential increase in personal video data, users will not be able to locate interesting parts in their personal media.

Similarly, without browsing capabilities inside video and between related video users will not be able to explore their vast personal video library.

Therefore, although partial solutions for the problems discussed above exist for more than 20 years, it is hard to point on a single usable system for browsing, searching and sharing personal video.

This lack of suitable solutions explains the relatively tiny fraction of personal video, which is actually shared in the Internet.

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