Minimum dependency key frames selection via quadratic mutual information

Key frame selection, which aims to choose a small number of frames that well represent the entire video contents, is one of the important research issues in video content analysis. Many existing methods developed so far use some prior information about the contents of video frames based on high-level semantic features, and thus they are applicable only in particular problems. Without any prior information, approaches based on low-level index features such as clusters, correlation, and consecutive frame difference are useful. Key frames found by these approaches are expected to be as much different from each other as possible. Therefore, accurately evaluating the difference among candidate key frames is a key challenge. However, a standard similarity metric such as the squared error and the cross correlation tends to provide redundant key frames. To cope with this problem, we propose to use quadratic mutual information (QMI) as an alternative similarity measure, which allows us to capture higher-order correlation for more than two variables simultaneously. Through experiments, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed QMI-based key frame selection method that uses an accurate and computationally efficient least-squares QMI estimator.