Content-based copy and paste from video documents.

ABSTRACTUnlike text, copying and pasting parts of video documents is challenging. Yet, the abundance of video documents now available including how-to tutorials requires simpler tools that allow users to easily copy and paste fragments of video materials into new documents. We describe new direct video manipulation techniques enabling users to quickly copy and paste content from video documents into a user's own multimedia document. While the video plays, users interact with the video canvas to select text regions, scrollable regions, slide sequences built up across many frames, or semantically meaningful regions such as dialog boxes. Instead of relying on the timeline to accurately select sub-parts of the video document, users navigate using familiar selection techniques such as mouse-wheel to scroll back and forward over a video shot in which the content scrolls, double-clicks over rectangular regions to select them, or clicks and drags over textual regions of the video canvas to select them. We describe the video processing techniques that run in real-time in modern web browsers using HTML5 and JavaScript; and show how they help users quickly copy and paste video fragments into new documents, allowing them to efficiently reuse video documents for authoring or note-taking.