In many current video browsing interfaces, video clips are represented using single-frame thumbnails that don't convey the motion in the video. But professional storyboard artists have developed an iconography for representing motion in still images that is easily understandable. We have developed a system to assist a user in the creation of these schematic storyboards from video input. After a few minutes of user annotations, our system produces a storyboard in either a realistic or a sketchy drawing style. The resulting diagram can be used as an interface for selecting moments and scrubbing through time, by clicking and dragging on the elements of the storyboard. Details are given in our SIGGRAPH '06 paper.
UPDATE (August 2007): Almost a year after presenting this work at SIGGRAPH, a colleague pointed us to Dony et al., "Iconic versus naturalistic motion cues in automated reverse storyboarding," which precedes our own work by several months and contains several related contributions. Our apologies to the authors for being unaware of this related work.
Below are some results produced using our technique, with links to the corresponding video clip.
Dan B Goldman, Brian Curless, David Salesin and Steven M. Seitz. "Schematic Storyboarding for Video Visualization and Editing." ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2006), Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 862-871, July 2006. [PDF (5.8M)] [QuickTime (98.1M)] [BibTeX]