Motionsnap: A Motion Sensor-Based Approach for Automatic Capture and Editing of Photos and Videos on Smartphones

Taking photos and videos with smartphones has become part of our daily life. However, it is still challenging to capture a brief action at the right time (e.g. jump photos), and video editing (e.g. local slow motion) remains a manual, time-consuming task. To address this problem, we present a motion sensor-based approach that leverages the advanced technical features of modern smartphones to facilitate the capture and editing tasks. Concretely, we simultaneously record the motion sensor data from a smartphone carried by the object of interest, as well as a video from a remote smartphone cam-era. Taking advantage of the motion sensor data, our approach can automatically "snap" the video editing effect to the input video, i.e. apply the effect (e.g. local slow motion) at the right time. The proposed approach is shown to be effective in various applications. Moreover, we implemented it as an app for Android smartphones, running in a fully automatic manner.