Slit Tears: Visualizing Video over Time
Video slicing — a variant of slit scanning in photography — extracts a scan line from a video frame and successively adds that line to a composite image over time. The composite image becomes a time line, where its visual patterns reflect changes in a particular area of the video stream. We extend this idea of video slicing by allowing users to draw marks anywhere on the source video to capture areas of interest. These marks, which we call slit-tears, are used in place of a scan line, and the resulting composite timeline image provides a much richer visualization of the video data. Depending on how tears are placed, they can accentuate motion, small changes, directional movement, and relational patterns. The software below implements one version of slit-tears
Contents
Download and Installation
- SlitTears, Version 2.0: This version creates static timelines, and adds a few features for skipping through frames in a video.
- SlitTears, Version 1.0: This C# version uses a package we wrote called EasyImages to get and manipulate video frames, as well as a 3rd party software written by Corinna John (Hannnover, Germany) to read frames from an AVI file. Both are included as dlls. See Installation Instructions.
TimeLine Installation Instructions:
- Unzip the file
- Navigate to SlitTears-Version1 -> SlitTears -> bin -> Release
- Run SlitTears.exe
- If you are not sure what to do, look at the Slit Tears Instructional Video
Bug List
- There are several bugs, but they shouldn't get in the way of understanding the concept
- it sometimes loses a bit of one's sketching action atop the video - reading in of video files is somewhat limited to certain types
Links
- Tang, A., Greenberg, S. and Fels, S. (2008) Exploring Video Streams Using Slit-Tear Visualizations. In Proceedings of Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI'08). (Napoli, Italy), pages 191-198, May 28-30.
- Tang, A., Greenberg, S. and Fels, S. (2008) Exploring Video Streams Using Slit-Tear Visualizations: The Video. Research report 2008-897-10, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Duration 6:20.
- Timeline is a simpler type of slit-tear, that captures the region only under a single vertical line.
- Tutorial on Slit Scanning shows how to create a simple vertical slit-tear using EasyImages and C#.
Tutorials and Examples
- See the Slit Tears Instructional Video to see how to use the system