This is a Matlab implementation of the paper:

StoryGraphs: Visualizing Character Interactions as a Timeline
Makarand Tapaswi, Martin Bäuml, and Rainer Stiefelhagen
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014
Project page | Paper download | ShotThreading & SceneDetection code

This project was inspired by the famous webcomic XKCD, in particular the narrative charts.

Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, with Matlab versions: R2013b and R2014a.
I haven't tried with the new graphics engine on Matlab R2014b and draw_storygraphs.m may need some changes.

The first_init.m script will be called on running startup.m the first time. This will ask you to install three external toolboxes. Please follow the instructions.

VS = BBT(1, 1);
SG = storygraph(VS);

Currently supported with ground-truth face identification for two TV series

• The Big Bang Theory (BBT) season 1, episodes 1 -- 6
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BUFFY) season 5, episodes 1 -- 6

They can be automatically generated by calling the script cameraready_draw_sg.m. Line 70 runexp = 1; controls which experiment is performed.

• jsonlab: Matlab JSON interface
• export_fig: (Optional) Save generated StoryGraphs
• xticklabel_rotate: Rotate figure XTick labels (Matlab R2014b onwards has inbuilt support!)

• storygraph.m Generates the StoryGraph for video
• storygraph_objective.m The main objective function with gradient computation
• storygraph_optimization.m Optimization wrapper for Matlab's fmincon
• draw_storygraph.m StoryGraph drawing function (run directly to try with random data)
• co_occurrence_scenes.m Character occurrence matrix for each scene of the video

• 03-12-2014: v0.1: First working implementation for BBT, BUFFY