Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Chris Pal

Richard S Szeliski

Drew Edward Steedly

Desney S Tan

Eric H Rudolph

Patrick Markus Baudisch

Matthew Uyttendaele

Nebojsa Jojic

A 'Video Browser' provides interactive browsing of unique events occurring within an overall video recording. In particular, the Video Browser processes the video to generate a set of video sprites representing unique events occurring within the overall period of the video. These unique events include, for example, motion events, security events, or other predefined event types, occurring within all or part of the total period covered by the video. Once the video has been processed to identify the sprites, the sprites are then arranged over a background image extracted from the video to create an interactive static video montage. The interactive video montage illustrates all events occurring within the video in a single static frame. User selection of sprites within the montage causes either playback of a portion of the video in which the selected sprites were identified, or concurrent playback of the selected sprites within a dynamic video montage.

Interactive montages of sprites for indexing and summarizing video

A 'Keyframe Stitcher' provides an efficient technique for building mosaic panoramic images by registering or aligning video frames to construct a mosaic panoramic representation. Matching of image pairs is performed by extracting feature points from every image frame and matching those points between image pairs. Further, the Keyframe Stitcher preserves accuracy of image stitching when matching image pairs by utilizing ordering information inherent in the video. The cost of searching for matches between image frames is reduced by identifying 'keyframes' based on computed image-to-image overlap. Keyframes are then matched to all other keyframes, but intermediate image frames are only matched to temporally neighboring keyframes and neighboring intermediate frames to construct a &#x201c;match structure.&#x201d; Image orientations are then estimated from this match structure and used to construct the mosaic. Matches between image pairs may be compressed to reduce computational overhead by replacing groups of feature points with representative measurements.

Video registration and image sequence stitching

A 'Panoramic Viewfinder' provides an intuitive interactive viewfinder display which operates on a digital camera display screen. This interactive viewfinder provides real-time assistance in capturing images for constructing panoramic image mosaics. The Panoramic Viewfinder 'brushes' a panorama from images captured in any order, while providing visual feedback to the user for ensuring that desired scene elements will appear in the final panorama. This visual feedback presents real-time stitched previews of the panorama while capturing images. In one embodiment, the viewfinder display of the Panoramic Viewfinder includes a &#x201c;mosaic preview&#x201d; which presents a stitched mosaic preview of the captured images; a live display window representing a &#x201c;current content&#x201d; of the camera viewfinder, which is mapped to a matching location within the mosaic preview; and an optional panoramic &#x201c;cropping frame&#x201d; overlaid onto the mosaic preview which illustrates a section of the mosaic which will survive a rectangular cropping of the mosaic.

Real-time preview for panoramic images

Growing community of inventors

Cambridge, Canada

Chris Pal