Dissolve detection for archive films

The paper proposes a novel pixel based method for the detection of dissolves in archive films. Initially, video frames are sub-sampled in order to reduce effects caused by zoom and visual degradations encountered in the video. Object and camera movement effects are reduced using an excessive change mask that rules out pixels that display extreme variations. Ascending, descending and constant pixel characteristics are tracked within a period of thirty frames and the local peaks of a metric constructed using these characteristics are utilized for dissolve detection.