ABSTRACT

Temporal segmentation of video data is the process aimed at the detection and classification of transitions between subsequent sequences of frames semantically homogeneous and characterized by spatiotemporal continuity. These sequences, generally called camera-shots, constitute the basic units of a video indexing system. In fact, from a functional point of view, temporal segmentation of video data can be considered as the first step of the more general process of content-based automatic video indexing. Although the principal application of temporal segmentation is in the generation of contentbased video databases, there are other important fields of application. For example in video browsing, automatic summarization of sports video or automatic trailer generation of movies temporal segmentation is implicitly needed. Another field of application of temporal segmentation is the transcoding of MPEG 1 or 2 digital video to the new MPEG-4 standard. As MPEG-4 is based on video objects that are not coded in MPEG 1 or 2, a temporal segmentation step is in general needed to detect and track the objects across the video.