Rapid Video Summarization on Compressed Video

Recent advances in technology have increased the availability of video data, creating a strong requirement for efficient systems to manage those materials. Making efficient use of video information requires that data be accessed in a user-friendly way. This has been the goal of a quickly evolving research area known as video summarization. Most of existing techniques to address the problem of summarizing a video sequence have focused on the uncompressed domain. However, decoding and analyzing of a video sequence are two extremely time-consuming tasks. Since video data are usually available in compressed form, it is desirable to directly process video material without decoding. In this paper, we present a novel approach for video summarization that works in the compressed domain. The proposed method is based on both exploiting visual features extracted from the video stream and on using a simple and fast algorithm to summarize the video content. Results from a rigorous empirical comparison with a subjective evaluation show that our approach produces video summaries with superior quality relative to the state-of-the-art solutions and in a computational time that allows on-the-fly usage.