A bottom-up summarization algorithm for videos in the wild.

Video summarization aims to provide a compact video representation while preserving the essential activities of the original video. Most existing video summarization approaches relay on identifying important frames and optimizing target energy by a global optimum solution. But global optimum may fail to express continuous action or realistically validate how human beings perceive a story. In this paper, we present a bottom-up approach named clip growing for video summarization, which allows users to customize the quality of the video summaries. The proposed approach firstly uses clustering to oversegment video frames into video clips based on their similarity and proximity. Simultaneously, the importance of frames and clips is evaluated from their corresponding dissimilarity and representativeness. Then, video clips and frames are gradually selected according to their energy rank, until reaching the target length. Experimental results on SumMe dataset show that our algorithm can produce promising results compared to existing algorithms. Several video summarizations results are presented in supplementary material.