Intelligent video display can improve visual detail and quality on mobile devices
Changick Kim · SPIE Newsroom · 2006
Although multifunctional hand-held devices are proliferating rapidly, for reasons of cost they generally feature video services that merely offer resized content for mobile consumption. Experiments to assess image resolution and bit-rate requirements indicate that the primary defect of the reduced image resolution is loss of visual detail. Field sports are more problematic than music, news, and animation. Soccer, one of the most popular broadcast sports (see Figure 1), is a prime example. For some types of content, an intelligent display scheme would generate a magnified view of regions of interest (ROIs), defined as some portion of a scene to which the viewer will pay special attention. Determining ROIs is valuable for contextaware content adaptation, transcoding, and intelligent information management. In addition, it can serve as a first step to semantic-level interpretation. Instead of traditional visual salience orientation, we employ a domain-specific approach to exploit the particular attributes of soccer video. We distinguish between the various camera angles and the long shot, in which the ball and players are tiny when viewed on a small display, as in Figure 2(a). The scene would be more readily understood if an ROI were extracted and magnified. Other frames, whether mid-shots or close-ups, are easily understood: see Figure 2(b) and (c). Thus, for improved display on a small LCD panel, the frames can be sorted into just two categories, and only a part of a whole image need be extracted from the long-shot frames.