Design and evaluation of mProducer: a mobile authoring tool for personal experience computing

ABSTRACT

Personal experience computing is about computing support for recording, storing, retrieving, editing, analyzing, and sharing of personal experiences. In this paper, we present our design, implementation and evaluation of a mobile authoring tool called mProducer. mProducer enables a user to generate personal experience content using a mobile device anytime, anywhere. To address challenges in both limited system resources and user interface constraints on a mobile device, mProducer provides several innovative system techniques and UI designs. (1) The Storage Constrained Uploading (SCU) algorithm uploads large multimedia data to remote servers, in order to alleviate the problem of limited storage on a mobile device. (2) Sensor-Assisted Automated Editing utilizes a tilt sensor on the mobile device to automate the detection and removal of blurry frames resulting from excessive amount of camera shaking. This sensor-based solution requires small processing overhead, and it is considered a good alternative to computational-expensive image processing techniques for detecting shaking artifacts. (3) Map-based content management interface incorporates a GPS receiver on a mobile device to record location meta-data for each recording captured by a user, and enables easy, intuitive content navigation on a small screen. (4) Keyframe-based editing enables a user to edit content using only keyframes. We have conducted user studies to evaluate overall editing experience, user satisfaction in the editing quality, task performance time, ease-of-use, and learnability. The results of user studies have shown that keyframe-based editing works best with a storyboard interface. In general, users have found mProducer to be both fun and easy to use on a mobile device.

REFERENCES

• 1: A. Girgensohn et al. Home video editing made easy: Balancing automation and user control. In Human-Computer Interaction: INTERACT, 2001.
• 2: Chao-Ming Teng, Chon-In Wu, and Hao-hua Chu. mProducer: authoring multimedia personal experiences on mobile phones. In Int'l Conf. on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2004.
• 3: Risto Sarvas , Erick Herrarte , Anita Wilhelm , Marc Davis, Metadata creation system for mobile images, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, June 06-09, 2004, Boston, MA, USA [doi>10.1145/990064.990072]
• 4: Francis C. Li , Anoop Gupta , Elizabeth Sanocki , Li-wei He , Yong Rui, Browsing digital video, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.169-176, April 01-06, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/332040.332425]
• 5: U. Gargi and R. Kasturi. An evaluation of color histogram based methods in video indexing. In International Workshop on Image Databases and Multimedia Search, 1996.
• 6: Glorianna Davenport , Thomas Aguirre Smith , Natalio Pincever, Cinematic Primitives for Multimedia, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.11 n.4, p.67-74, July 1991 [doi>10.1109/38.126883]
• 7: H. J. Zhang , C. Y. Low , S. W. Smoliar , J. H. Wu, Video parsing, retrieval and browsing: an integrated and content-based solution, Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Multimedia, p.15-24, November 05-09, 1995, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/217279.215068]
• 8: T. Jokela. Authoring tools for mobile multimedia content. In IEEE Int'l Conf. on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), pages 637--640, 2003.
• 9: Anita Komlodi , Gary Marchionini, Key frame preview techniques for video browsing, Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Digital libraries, p.118-125, June 23-26, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/276675.276688]
• 10: Cees G. M. Snoek , Marcel Worring, Multimodal Video Indexing: A Review of the State-of-the-art, Multimedia Tools and Applications, v.25 n.1, p.5-35, January 2005 [doi>10.1023/B:MTAP.0000046380.27575.a5]
• 11: Tony Tse , Gary Marchionini , Wei Ding , Laura Slaughter , Anita Komlodi, Dynamic key frame presentation techniques for augmenting video browsing, Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, May 24-27, 1998, L'Aquila, Italy [doi>10.1145/948496.948522]
• 12: Vodaphone, Japan. http://www.vodafone.jp/english/.
• 13: Wei-Qi Yan , Mohan S Kankanhalli, Detection and removal of lighting & shaking artifacts in home videos, Proceedings of the tenth ACM international conference on Multimedia, December 01-06, 2002, Juan-les-Pins, France [doi>10.1145/641007.641031]
• 14: W. Li. Overview of fine granularity scalability in MPEG-4 video standard. In IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 2001.
• 15: H. J. Zhang , C. Y. Low , S. W. Smoliar , J. H. Wu, Video parsing, retrieval and browsing: an integrated and content-based solution, Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Multimedia, p.15-24, November 05-09, 1995, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/217279.215068]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.0 General

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
mobile user interfaces, multimedia editing tools, personal experiences, sensors