The power of video over still images is the ability to represent dynamic activities. But video browsing and retrieval are inconvenient due to inherent spatio-temporal redundancies, where some time intervals may have no activity, or have activities that occur in a small image region. Video synopsis aims to provide a compact video representation, while preserving the essential activities of the original video. We present dynamic video synopsis, where most of the activity in the video is condensed by simultaneously showing several actions, even when they originally occurred at different times. For example, we can create a ”stroboscopic movie”, where multiple dynamic instances of a moving object are played simultaneously. This is an extension of the still stroboscopic picture. Previous approaches for video abstraction addressed mostly the temporal redundancy by selecting representative key-frames or time intervals. In dynamic video synopsis the activity is shifted into a significantly shorter period, in which the activity is much denser.

The CVPR'06 paper (pdf) .

Followup Paper: "Webcam Synopsis: Peeking Around the World", ICCV'07 .

Some Examples of Dynamic Video Synopsis
Press on the image to play the video

Thanks to Lena and her dad for contributing the Monkey Bars sequence.

"Monkey Bar" – Input

"Monkey Bar" -Output

Lioness Input

Lioness Output

Surveillance 1

Surveillance 2