VideoSkip: event detection in social web videos with an implicit user heuristic

In this paper, we present a user-based event detection method for social web videos. Previous research in event detection has focused on content-based techniques, such as pattern recognition algorithms that attempt to understand the contents of a video. There are few user-centric approaches that have considered either search keywords, or external data such as comments, tags, and annotations. Moreover, some of the user-centric approaches imposed an extra effort to the users in order to capture required information. In this research, we are describing a method for the analysis of implicit users’ interactions with a web video player, such as pause, play, and thirty-seconds skip or rewind. The results of our experiments indicated that even the simple user heuristic of local maxima might effectively detect the same video-events, as indicated manually. Notably, the proposed technique was more accurate in the detection of events that have a short duration, because those events motivated increased user interaction in video hot-spots. The findings of this research provide evidence that we might be able to infer semantics about a piece of unstructured data just from the way people actually use it.