Slit-Tear Video Exploration

A novel metaphor for exploring and understanding video

Slit-tears ease exploration of video data. Here: (1) the analyst draws to red slit tears in the video frame; (2) the timeline updates to show what happens under each tear for every frame in the video, while (3) the current frame shown is indicated by the red line.
Slit-tears ease exploration of video data. Here: (1) the analyst draws to red slit tears in the video frame; (2) the timeline updates to show what happens under each tear for every frame in the video, while (3) the current frame shown is indicated by the red line.

We explore the use of interactive slit-scanning for the purpose of video exploration. We show how such interactive slits (which we call slit-tears) allow for trivial identification of “interesting” events in video (Tang, Greenberg, & Fels, 2008; Tang, Greenberg, & Fels, 2009). This timeline is interactive, and allows for recovery of the original video frame. We argue that the slit-tear technique can be used to simplify computer vision techniques (Tang, Lanir, Greenberg, & Fels, 2008), as the resulting visualizations are simple 2D representations of the original scene. That, and it’s pretty wicked cool to look and play with.

Publications

  1. Anthony Tang, Saul Greenberg, and Sidney Fels. (2009). Exploring video streams using slit-tear visualizations. In CHI EA ’09: CHI ’09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 3509–3510. (video).
    Notes: Best Research Video Nominee.
  2. Anthony Tang, Joel Lanir, Saul Greenberg, and Sid Fels. (2008). Uncovering Activity and Patterns in Video using Slit-Tear Visualizations. Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4. (techreport).
  3. Anthony Tang, Saul Greenberg, and Sidney Fels. (2008). Exploring video streams using slit-tear visualizations. In AVI ’08: Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, ACM, 191–198. (conference).