Towards Distributed Video Summarization

Video summarization is a fertile topic in multimedia research. While the advent of modern video cameras and several social networking and video sharing websites (like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook) has led to the generation of humongous amounts of redundant video data, video summarization has emerged as an effective methodology to automatically extract a succinct and condensed representation of a given video. The unprecedented increase in the volume of video data necessitates the usage of multiple, independent computers for its storage and processing. In order to understand the overall essence of a video, it is therefore necessary to develop an algorithm which can summarize a video distributed across multiple computers. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for distributed video summarization. Our algorithm requires minimal communication among the computers (over which the video is stored) and also enjoys nice theoretical properties. Our empirical results on several challenging, unconstrained videos corroborate the potential of the proposed framework for real-world distributed video summarization applications.