MoVi: Mobile phone based video highlights via collaborative sensing

Sensor networks have been conventionally defined as a network of sensor motes that collaboratively detect events and report them to a remote monitoring station. This paper makes an attempt to extend this notion to the social context by using mobile phones as a replacement for motes. We envision a social application where mobile phones collaboratively sense their ambience and recognize socially "interesting" events. The phone with a good view of the event triggers a video recording, and later, the video-clips from different phones are "stitched" into a video highlights of the occasion. We observe that such a video highlights is akin to the notion of event coverage in conventional sensor networks, only the notion of "event" has changed from physical to social. We have built a Mobile Phone based Video Highlights system (MoVi) using Nokia phones and iPod Nanos, and have experimented in real-life social gatherings. Results show that MoVi-generated video highlights (created offline) are quite similar to those created manually, (i.e., by painstakingly editing the entire video of the occasion). In that sense, MoVi can be viewed as a collaborative information distillation tool capable of filtering events of social relevance.