Structured digital video indexing

This paper addresses the problems of film segmentation into its syntactic elements (the shots) and of their aggregation into semantic sets under constrained conditions: the shot/reverse-shot scenes (SRS). It then addresses the problem of describing the dynamic content of each shot through the analysis of camera motion. New techniques for edit effect detection and classification are herein proposed. A new algorithm is thereby introduced for automatic inferring the belonging of a set of shots to the same SRS scene. Finally, an algorithm is presented, which segments a sequence into regions having different motion types and extracts the camera motion. Extended performance analysis of the algorithms has been made on about 20 hours movies