Thematic video thumbnail selection

Existing techniques to automatically create image thumbnail(s) for videos are mostly based on low-level feature analysis of the video frames, such as color and motion information. However, these approaches do not contain semantic models of the underlying theme of the video, and as a result, the selected frames may not be semantically representative. To address this problem, we propose a theme-based keyframe selection algorithm that explicitly models the visual characteristics of the underlying video theme. This thematic model is constructed by finding the common features of relevant visual samples, which are obtained by querying a visual database with keywords associated with the video. Our initial testing on a set of videos shows promising results of our video thumbnail image selection method.