From video to photo albums

The revolution in consumer electronics for capturing video has been followed by an explosion of video content. However, meaningful consumption models of such rich media for nonprofessional users are still emerging. In contrast to those of video cameras, the consumption models for output of still cameras have been long established and are considerably simpler. The output of a still camera is an image of sufficiently high quality and high resolution for a good quality production on paper. Due to ease of use, mobility, high quality and simplicity paper photographs are still incomparable in terms of overall human experience. On the other hand, video content by itself is not as easy to use. Consumption of video content requires computers and/or video display devices and so cannot be instantaneously displayed or shared. Rendition on paper is much more complex for video content compared to still camera images. In contrast with the simplicity of usage of still cameras, video camera output has to be edited on computer, key frames with good visual quality have to be manually extracted, digitally edited and prepared for printing before getting usable good quality photographs. Due to complexity of the video content, users often prefer to take still pictures instead of recording video clips. In this paper we describe an approach to construct an end-to-end digital publishing workflow system that automatically composes visually appealing photo albums with high quality photographic images from video content input.