New Algorithm Skips Past Boring Parts in Videos

LOS ANGELES—Motherboard reported yesterday that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University "have developed an algorithm that sifts the interesting bits out of the tedium so you can watch the good bits without sitting through the filler—like a trailer of highlights for boring home movies." Or porn. The algorithm essentially looks for repetitive frames and marks them as unnecessary for the eye to see. In a press release issued Tuesday, the team explains, "Called LiveLight, this method constantly evaluates action in the video, looking for visual novelty and ignoring repetitive or eventless sequences, to create a summary that enables a viewer to get the gist of what happened. What it produces is a miniature video trailer. Although not yet comparable to a professionally edited video, it can help people quickly review a long video of an event, a security camera feed, or video from a police cruiser's windshield camera." Or porn. Look, we don't mean to be insensitive about it, but in a world in which people are increasingly watching individual porn scenes on tube sites that already reduce what is seen to the ... ahem, bare essentials, the algorithm has the potential to basically take the place of fast-forwarding when it comes to porn DVDs, which can often run a felonious four hours in length. That right there could save the ligaments in millions of fingers. Of course, the algorithm would also be good for surveillance videos, where nothing happens for hours at a stretch, but hell, we don't really want to spend too much time on the similarities between porn movies and surveillance videos, or state of the union addresses, or watching paint dry, or Gigli. Image: The above photo shows frames of a video. The frames bordered in red were selected for summarization by the algorithm. Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University.