Seminar by Piyush Agrawal

ViewXtreme - A novel paradigm for watching instructional videos

Piyush Agrawal
Stanford University
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Time: 4:00 PM
Venue: CS101.

Abstract:

ViewXtreme is a novel video streaming paradigm, which enables watching high-resolution videos with pan/tilt/zoom functionality. It can be considered as the counterpart of Google Maps (or any other interactive maps application), but for videos instead of static images. ViewXtreme enables educational institutes to fully automate high quality lecture capturing and publishing, with minimal infrastructure, while creating an immersive experience for both on-campus and remote students. The technology grew out of the observation that each student naturally wants to focus on different things in instructional videos. One student might want to look at the lecturer, another student might want to attend to one of the boards and yet another student might want to look at a different board. All current lecture-capturing technologies either depend on human camera operators or record a limited view of the classroom with a static camera. Alas, none of the existing solutions provide the flexibility to the students to select views they want to see. ViewXtreme enables this by capturing the entire podium in high resolution and letting the student focus on objects-of-interest interactively. This is achieved without requiring any extra bandwidth, since only relevant parts of the video are sent to the viewer in high resolution. Additionally, using computer vision algorithms, the system automatically tracks the lecturer, providing a recommended view, thus reducing navigation burden. More information at: http://viewxtreme.stanford.edu

About The Speaker:

Piyush Agrawal is currently a graduate student at the department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. He works with Prof. Bernd Girod in the Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Group. Earlier, he completed M.Tech and B.Tech (dual degree) program in Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Kanpur in 2008, where he worked with Prof. R.K. Ghosh and was awarded the Cadence Gold Medal for the Best Master's thesis across all engineering departments. He has co-authored over 8 conference and journal articles and is an inventor of 1 U.S. patent (filed). More information at: http://www.stanford.edu/~piyushag

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