Tracking Visual Differences for Generation and Playback of User-Customized Notifications

Date
2005-04-28
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Abstract
Notification systems alert individuals or groups of changing information that is of interest to them. The problem is that it is difficult for people to gather notifications of personal interest; they must either rely on the generic offerings of the information provider, or construct their own services through coding. In this paper, we contribute a simple yet effective method that lets people create custom notification elements by image assembly, where notifications are triggered through visual differencing. First, after finding information of interest on a web page, the person constructs a visual collage selected from regions on the page. These are regions of the fully rendered bitmap view of the page i.e., they are not coupled to the page s underlying HTML markup. The composite image created from this collage will be used to assemble a notification of relevant changes to that web page. Second, the person specifies one or more regions on the page that will be compared for visual differences over time, and how often the page should be revisited to check for these differences. The system will automatically generate a notification (the composite image plus a title and timestamp) when differences go beyond a user provided threshold. Finally, the person can view the notifications in several ways: as only the most recently changed version (to illustrate current state), or as an image history that can be either browsed individually or played back as a continuous video stream (to see changes over time).
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Computer Science
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