Small displays on mobile handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones, are the bottlenecks for usability of most content browsing applications. Generally, conventional content such as documents and Web pages need to be modified for effective presentation on mobile devices. This paper proposes a novel visualization for documents, called multimedia thumbnails, which consists of text and image content converted into playable multimedia clips. A multimedia thumbnail utilizes visual and audio channels of small portable devices as well as both spatial and time dimensions to communicate text and image information of a single document. The proposed algorithm for generating multimedia thumbnails includes 1) a semantic document analysis step, where salient content from a source document is extracted; 2) an optimization step, where a subset of this extracted content is selected based on time, display, and application constraints; and 3) a composition step, where the selected visual and audible document content is combined into a multimedia thumbnail. Scalability of MMNails that allows generation of multimedia clips of various lengths is also described. A user study is presented that evaluates the effectiveness of the proposed multimedia thumbnail visualization.

It is difficult to view multipage, high resolution documents on devices with small displays. As a solution, we introduce a multimedia thumbnail representation, which can be seen as a multimedia clip that provides an automated guided tour through a document. Multimedia thumbnails are automatically generated by taking a document image as input and first performing visual and audible information analysis on the document to determine salient document elements. Next, the time and information attributes for each document element are computed by taking into account the display and application constraints. An optimization routine, given a time constraint, selects elements to be included in the multimedia thumbnail. Last, the selected elements are synthesized into animated images and audio to create the final multimedia representation

As small portable devices are becoming standard personal equipments, there is a great need for the adaptation of information content to small displays. Currently, no good solutions exist for viewing formatted documents, such as pdf documents, on these devices. Adapting content of web pages to small displays is usually achieved by complete redesign of a page or automatically reflowing text for small displays. Such techniques may not be applicable to documents whose format needs to be preserved. To address this problem, we propose a new document representation called Multimedia Thumbnail. Multimedia Thumbnail uses the visual and audio channels of small portable devices to communicate document information in form of a multimedia clip, which can be seen as a movie trailer for a document. Generation of such a clip includes a document analysis step, where salient document information is extracted, an optimization step, where the document information to be included in the thumbnail is determined based on display and time constraints, and a synthesis step, where visual and audible information are formed into a playable Multimedia Thumbnail. We also present user study results that evaluate an initial system design and point to further modification on analysis, optimization, and user interface components.

Browsing multi-page high-resolution documents on devices with small displays and limited navigational capabilities is very difficult. In this paper we demonstrate Multimedia Thumbnails, which are automatically computed guided-tours of documents. Multimedia Thumbnails utilize temporal dimension and the audio channel of the portable device in order to compensate for the limited resolution of the display area.