Fast Approximate Matching of Cell-Phone Videos for Robust Background Subtraction

We identify a novel instance of the background subtraction problem that focuses on extracting near-field foreground objects captured using handheld cameras. Given two user-generated videos of a scene, one with and the other without the foreground object(s), our goal is to efficiently generate an output video with only the foreground object(s) present in it. We cast this challenge as a spatio-temporal frame matching problem, and propose an efficient solution for it that exploits the temporal smoothness of the video sequences. We present theoretical analyses for the error bounds of our approach, and validate our findings using a detailed set of simulation experiments. Finally, we present the results of our approach tested on multiple real videos captured using handheld cameras, and compare them to several alternate foreground extraction approaches.

Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother's

Did celebrity last longer in 1929, 1992 or 2009? We investigate the phenomenon of fame by mining a collection of news articles that spans the twentieth century, and also perform a side study on a collection of blog posts from the last 10 years. By analyzing mentions of personal names, we measure each person's time in the spotlight, using two simple metrics that evaluate, roughly, the duration of a single news story about a person, and the overall duration of public interest in a person. We watched the distribution evolve from 1895 to 2010, expecting to find significantly shortening fame durations, per the much popularly bemoaned shortening of society's attention spans and quickening of media's news cycles. Instead, we conclusively demonstrate that, through many decades of rapid technological and societal change, through the appearance of Twitter, communication satellites, and the Internet, fame durations did not decrease, neither for the typical case nor for the extremely famous, with the last statistically significant fame duration decreases coming in the early 20th century, perhaps from the spread of telegraphy and telephony. Furthermore, while median fame durations stayed persistently constant, for the most famous of the famous, as measured by either volume or duration of media attention, fame durations have actually trended gently upward since the 1940s, with statistically significant increases on 40-year timescales. Similar studies have been done with much shorter timescales specifically in the context of information spreading on Twitter and similar social networking sites. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first massive scale study of this nature that spans over a century of archived data, thereby allowing us to track changes across decades.