Narrative generation by repurposing digital videos

Abstract

Storytelling and narrative creation are very popular research issues in the field of interactive media design. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating video narrative from existing videos which user only needs to involve in two steps: (1) select background video and avatars; (2) set up the movement and trajectory of avatars. To generate a realistic video narrative, several important steps have to be implemented. First, a video scene generation process is designed to generate a video mosaic. This video mosaic can be used as a basis for narrative planning. Second, an avatar preprocessing procedure with moderate avatar control technologies is designed to regulate a number of specific properties, such as the size or the length of constituent motion clips, and control the motion of avatars. Third, a layer merging algorithm and a spatiotemporal replacement algorithm are developed to ensure the visual quality of a generated video narrative. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, we generated several realistic video narratives from some chosen video clips and the results turned out to be visually pleasing. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.