Building Movie Map -- A Tool for Exploring Areas in a City -- and its Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Movie Map system for city exploration using omnidirectional videos, featuring stages of acquisition, analysis, management, and interaction, and demonstrates its superior user experience over Google Street View.

Contribution

The paper presents a new Movie Map system with a comprehensive interface and evaluation, improving city exploration tools with video segmentation and virtual billboards.

Findings

System provides better user experience than GSV

Effective segmentation and localization of videos in city maps

Enhanced exploration through virtual billboards

Abstract

We propose a new Movie Map system, with an interface for exploring cities. The system consists of four stages; acquisition, analysis, management, and interaction. In the acquisition stage, omnidirectional videos are taken along streets in target areas. Frames of the video are localized on the map, intersections are detected, and videos are segmented. Turning views at intersections are subsequently generated. By connecting the video segments following the specified movement in an area, we can view the streets better. The interface allows for easy exploration of a target area, and it can show virtual billboards of stores in the view. We conducted user studies to compare our system to the GSV in a scenario where users could freely move and explore to find a landmark. The experiment showed that our system had a better user experience than GSV.