Movie abstraction via the progress of the storyline

An appropriate movie abstraction is helpful for movie producers to promote the progress of the storyline as well as for the audiences to capture the theme of the movie before watching the full-length movie. Most existing movie abstraction schemes rely heavily on video content only, which may not deliver ideal results because of the semantic gap between computer calculated low-level audiovisual features and human used high-level perceptual understanding. In this study, the authors incorporate script into movie content understanding and present a new movie abstraction approach via the progress of the storyline, which is the soul of a film that actually catches the audiences´ attention. The authors first segment the movie scenes by analysis of the movie script. Then the authors conduct storyline analysis using the attention analysis and audiovisual features. Given the transition intensity values, the authors calculate the storyline progress score and adopt this as the criterion to generate movie abstraction. The promising experimental results demonstrate that the analysis of storyline evolution is an effective approach for the abstraction and understanding of movie content.