Sensing Activity in Video Images

in CHI’97 Extended Abstract, ACM Press, pp. 319-320 based awareness tools and iconic indicators because it meets three crucial user requirements. This paper describes the activity sensing feature, the three user requirements, and how the activity sensing feature meets these requirements. WHAT: ACTIVITY SENSING In our Portholes system, a video image for each user is snapped once every five minutes. The images for the last hour (12 of them) are kept. The activity sensing capability uses a image difference mechanism to derive a measure for the amount of change ( ) between two successive video images. This measure is represented as a red horizontal bar at the bottom of the video image and can optionally be used to order the images in the Viewer (Figure 1). The red bars have the added benefit of making images with lots of activity “jump out” so that users can easily do a visual scan for activity. The “sort by amount of activity” feature displays images with lots of activity earl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Alison Lee, Kevin Schlueter, Andreas Girgensohn
• Keywords: Activity Sensing Feature, CHI 1997, Human Computer Interaction, User Requirements, Video Images