Stained-glass visualization for highly condensed video summaries

This work presents a method for creating highly condensed video summaries called stained-glass visualizations. These are especially suitable for small displays on mobile devices. A morphological grouping technique is described for finding 3D regions of high activity or motion from a video embedded in x-y-t space. These regions determine areas in the keyframes, which can be subsumed in a more general geometric framework of germs and supports: germs are the areas of interest, and supports give the context. Algorithms for packing and laying out the germs are provided. Gaps between the germs are filled using a Voronoi-based method. Irregular shapes emerge, and the result looks like stained glass.