Multi-Device Recording Stitching to Recover Missed Events
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Solution Overview
Problem
Users often miss capturing important events in user-generated content due to starting or stopping the recording at inappropriate times, leading to incomplete recordings of real-life, unscripted events.
Innovation Solution
A method that augments user-generated content by receiving and analyzing recordings from multiple devices, determining overlapping time intervals and locations, and selectively appending or replacing content to enhance the recording, using control circuitry to modify the first content with relevant portions from other devices.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a user manually starts and stops recording based on their awareness of events, then the recording device operates simply with basic recording functionality, but important events are missed when the user stops recording or is unaware of upcoming events
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by continuously monitoring content from multiple devices and pre-identifying potential events of interest before the user needs to record. The server analyzes content in advance, detects events, and prepares augmented content so that when a user records, the complete event coverage is already prepared and can be automatically integrated, eliminating the need for users to predict when to start/stop recording manually.
Solution Approach 2:
A server acts as an intermediary between multiple user devices and the final augmented content. The server receives content from multiple devices, performs event detection and analysis, determines which content should be augmented, and automatically integrates content from different devices. This intermediary handles the complexity of multi-device coordination, event detection algorithms, and content synchronization, keeping the user-side devices relatively simple while achieving reliable complete event capture.
2Reliability
If a user records continuously to ensure no events are missed, then all events are captured, but the user consumes excessive storage space and energy, and the recording becomes less focused on important moments
Solution Approach 1:
Instead of requiring every device to record continuously (excessive action), the system uses partial recording where each device records only when needed, and the server selectively augments content by adding portions from other devices. This partial action approach ensures complete event coverage while minimizing individual device recording time, reducing overall energy consumption and storage requirements across the system.
Solution Approach 2:
The system merges content from multiple user devices through the server, which combines recordings from different sources to create a complete augmented content. By merging partial recordings from multiple devices that captured different portions of events, the system achieves comprehensive event coverage equivalent to continuous recording by a single device, but with distributed energy consumption and storage requirements across multiple users' devices.
3Reliability
If content from multiple devices is automatically integrated, then missed events are recovered and recording completeness is improved, but the complexity of synchronizing and selecting content from multiple sources increases
Solution Approach 1:
The server serves as an intermediary that centralizes the complex tasks of receiving content from multiple devices, synchronizing timestamps, detecting events, determining overlapping time intervals, selecting relevant content portions, and integrating content from different sources. This intermediary absorbs the integration complexity, allowing individual user devices to remain simple while achieving reliable complete event capture through automated multi-device content merging.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses feedback mechanisms where the server analyzes content from multiple devices, detects events based on content analysis, and uses this feedback to determine which content portions should be augmented and how they should be integrated. The event detection and content selection processes rely on feedback from content analysis, timestamp comparison, and location data to automatically synchronize and integrate content from multiple devices with minimal user intervention.
4Reliability
If the system augments content by appending or replacing portions from other devices, then the user receives enhanced content with missed events included, but the processing and analysis required to determine appropriate augmentation increases
Solution Approach 1:
The server extracts only the necessary portions of content from multiple devices for augmentation purposes, rather than processing and analyzing entire recordings. By extracting specific time intervals where events occurred and only those relevant content portions needed for augmentation, the system reduces information processing overhead while still achieving complete event capture. The extraction is targeted based on event detection results, timestamp analysis, and location data.
Data Source
AI summary
User-generated content is received from multiple user devices, including first content recorded by a first user device during a first time interval and second content recorded by a second user device during a second time interval. If the second time interval immediately precedes, or immediately follows, the first time interval, then at least a portion of the second content may be appended to the first content. For example, if a user ends recording of the first content before an interesting event occurs, then a portion of the second content may be appended to the first content so that the user has a recording including the missed event. The second content may be selected based on a location, and/or a field of view of the second user device during the second time interval being similar to that of the first user device during the first time interval.