skip to main content


Title: Summarizing Lecture Videos by Key Handwritten Content Regions
We introduce a novel method for summarization of whiteboard lecture videos using key handwritten content regions. A deep neural network is used for detecting bounding boxes that contain semantically meaningful groups of handwritten content. A neural network embedding is learnt, under triplet loss, from the detected regions in order to discriminate between unique handwritten content. The detected regions along with embeddings at every frame of the lecture video are used to extract unique handwritten content across the video which are presented as the video summary. Additionally, a spatiotemporal index is constructed from the video which records the time and location of each individual summary region in the video which can potentially be used for content-based search and navigation. We train and test our methods on the publicly available AccessMath dataset. We use the DetEval scheme to benchmark our summarization by recall of unique ground truth objects (92.09%) and average number of summary regions (128) compared to the ground truth (88).  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1640867
NSF-PAR ID:
10188708
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition Workshops (ICDARW)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
13 to 18
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    Lecture videos are rapidly becoming an invaluable source of information for students across the globe. Given the large number of online courses currently available, it is important to condense the information within these videos into a compact yet representative summary that can be used for search-based applications. We propose a framework to summarize whiteboard lecture videos by finding feature representations of detected handwritten content regions to determine unique content. We investigate multi-scale histogram of gradients and embeddings from deep metric learning for feature representation. We explicitly handle occluded, growing and disappearing handwritten content. Our method is capable of producing two kinds of lecture video summaries - the unique regions themselves or so-called key content and keyframes (which contain all unique content in a video segment). We use weighted spatio-temporal conflict minimization to segment the lecture and produce keyframes from detected regions and features. We evaluate both types of summaries and find that we obtain state-of-the-art peformance in terms of number of summary keyframes while our unique content recall and precision are comparable to state-of-the-art. 
    more » « less
  2. Online lecture videos are increasingly important e-learning materials for students. Automated content extraction from lecture videos facilitates information retrieval applications that improve access to the lecture material. A significant number of lecture videos include the speaker in the image. Speakers perform various semantically meaningful actions during the process of teaching. Among all the movements of the speaker, key actions such as writing or erasing potentially indicate important features directly related to the lecture content. In this paper, we present a methodology for lecture video content extraction using the speaker actions. Each lecture video is divided into small temporal units called action segments. Using a pose estimator, body and hands skeleton data are extracted and used to compute motion-based features describing each action segment. Then, the dominant speaker action of each of these segments is classified using Random forests and the motion-based features. With the temporal and spatial range of these actions, we implement an alternative way to draw key-frames of handwritten content from the video. In addition, for our fixed camera videos, we also use the skeleton data to compute a mask of the speaker writing locations for the subtraction of the background noise from the binarized key-frames. Our method has been tested on a publicly available lecture video dataset, and it shows reasonable recall and precision results, with a very good compression ratio which is better than previous methods based on content analysis. 
    more » « less
  3. o fill a gap in online educational tools, we are working to support search in lecture videos using formulas from lecture notes and vice versa. We use an existing system to convert single-shot lecture videos to keyframe images that capture whiteboard contents along with the times they appear. We train classifiers for handwritten symbols using the CROHME dataset, and for LATEX symbols using generated images. Symbols detected in video keyframes and LATEX formula images are indexed using Line-of-Sight graphs. For search, we lookup pairs of symbols that can 'see' each other, and connected pairs are merged to identify the largest match within each indexed image. We rank matches using symbol class probabilities and angles between symbol pairs. We demonstrate how our method effectively locates formulas between typeset and handwritten images using a set of linear algebra lectures. By combining our search engine Tangent-V) with temporal keyframe metadata, we are able to navigate to where a query formula in LATEX is first handwritten in a lecture video. Our system is available as open-source. For other domains, only the OCR modules require updating. 
    more » « less
  4. Summary

    Leaf vein network geometry can predict levels of resource transport, defence and mechanical support that operate at different spatial scales. However, it is challenging to quantify network architecture across scales due to the difficulties both in segmenting networks from images and in extracting multiscale statistics from subsequent network graph representations.

    Here we developed deep learning algorithms using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to automatically segment leaf vein networks. Thirty‐eight CNNs were trained on subsets of manually defined ground‐truth regions from >700 leaves representing 50 southeast Asian plant families. Ensembles of six independently trained CNNs were used to segment networks from larger leaf regions (c. 100 mm2). Segmented networks were analysed using hierarchical loop decomposition to extract a range of statistics describing scale transitions in vein and areole geometry.

    The CNN approach gave a precision‐recall harmonic mean of 94.5% ± 6%, outperforming other current network extraction methods, and accurately described the widths, angles and connectivity of veins. Multiscale statistics then enabled the identification of previously undescribed variation in network architecture across species.

    We provide aLeafVeinCNNsoftware package to enable multiscale quantification of leaf vein networks, facilitating the comparison across species and the exploration of the functional significance of different leaf vein architectures.

     
    more » « less
  5. In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of recognition and segmentation tasks in medical imaging including brain tumor segmentation. We investigate that segmenting a brain tumor is facing to the imbalanced data problem where the number of pixels belonging to the background class (non tumor pixel) is much larger than the number of pixels belonging to the foreground class (tumor pixel). To address this problem, we propose a multitask network which is formed as a cascaded structure. Our model consists of two targets, i.e., (i) effectively differentiate the brain tumor regions and (ii) estimate the brain tumor mask. The first objective is performed by our proposed contextual brain tumor detection network, which plays a role of an attention gate and focuses on the region around brain tumor only while ignoring the far neighbor background which is less correlated to the tumor. Different from other existing object detection networks which process every pixel, our contextual brain tumor detection network only processes contextual regions around ground-truth instances and this strategy aims at producing meaningful regions proposals. The second objective is built upon a 3D atrous residual network and under an encode-decode network in order to effectively segment both large and small objects (brain tumor). Our 3D atrous residual network is designed with a skip connection to enables the gradient from the deep layers to be directly propagated to shallow layers, thus, features of different depths are preserved and used for refining each other. In order to incorporate larger contextual information from volume MRI data, our network utilizes the 3D atrous convolution with various kernel sizes, which enlarges the receptive field of filters. Our proposed network has been evaluated on various datasets including BRATS2015, BRATS2017 and BRATS2018 datasets with both validation set and testing set. Our performance has been benchmarked by both regionbased metrics and surface-based metrics. We also have conducted comparisons against state-of-the-art approaches 
    more » « less