A variety of applications are emerging to support streaming video from mobile devices. However, many tasks can benefit from streaming specific content rather than the full video feed which may include irrelevant, private, or distracting content. We describe a system that allows users to capture and stream targeted video content captured with a mobile device. The application incorporates a variety of automatic and interactive techniques to identify and segment desired content, allowing the user to publish a more focused video stream.
While other research projects have explored video retargeting, or automatically selecting salient subregions of a video for redisplay on smaller screens such as mobile devices @cite_6 , mVideoCast uniquely allows users to stream specific ROIs from a mobile device.
@cite_6
1980852932
When a video is displayed on a smaller display than originally intended, some of the information in the video is necessarily lost. In this paper, we introduce Video Retargeting that adapts video to better suit the target display, minimizing the important information lost. We define a framework that measures the preservation of the source material, and methods for estimating the important information in the video. Video retargeting crops each frame and scales it to fit the target display. An optimization process minimizes information loss by balancing the loss of detail due to scaling with the loss of content and composition due to cropping. The cropping window can be moved during a shot to introduce virtual pans and cuts, subject to constraints that ensure cinematic plausibility. We demonstrate results of adapting a variety of source videos to small display sizes.