Interactive Schematic Summaries for Faceted Exploration of Surveillance Video

Abstract

We present a scalable technique to explore surveillance videos by scatter/gather browsing of trajectories of moving objects. Trajectories are clustered according to a variety of properties, such as location, orientation, and velocity that can be selected by the users. These properties allow for faceted video exploration and refinement of previous browsing steps. The proposed approach facilitates interactive clustering of trajectories by an effective way of cluster visualization that we term schematic summaries. This novel visualization illustrates cluster summaries in a schematic, nonphotorealistic style. To reduce visual clutter, we introduce the trajectory bundling technique. Further, schematic summaries include a timeline view and a showcase view to represent the facets present in a cluster. The fusion of schematic summaries, a variety of facets, and user interaction lead to efficient hierarchical exploration of video data. Examples of different browsing scenarios and initial user feedback demonstrate the potentials of our method.