NewsThumbnail: Automatic Generation of News Video Thumbnail

Reading news is an important way for people to obtain information. People can quickly sort out the context of events through a short news video. However, there are numerous news generated around the world every day. It’s challenging to locate the interesting video. Thumbnails are often used as video covers and play an important role in displaying video content and driving views. Video owners can choose from individual images or elaborate thumbnails to upload to the site. But manually selecting from a large number of frames is time-consuming, and customizing thumbnails requires a high degree of expertise. Therefore, this paper proposes an automatic generation method of news video thumbnail, which can screen out semantically similar contents according to user query and combine them into a thumbnail. In order to facilitate the screening of graphic materials, we also propose a video content structuring method based on multiple cues, which can accurately segment the video into theme units. At the same time, we designed a visual system to display thumbnails and designed a user survey to investigate the performance of this method in news retrieval and understanding. Compared with peer methods, the thumbnails generated by our method can help users better understand the video content and locate the videos they are interested in.