An Evolutionary Approach to Automatic Video Editing

Digital video has become affordable and attractive to home users, but skill and manual labour are still required to transform amateur footage into aesthetically pleasing movies. We present a novel algorithm for transforming raw home video footage into concise, temporally salient clips. We interpret the sequence of editing operations applied to footage as a `program´ comprising cutting, panning and zooming constructs. We develop a Genetic Programming (GP) framework for representing and evolving such programs. Under this framework, the search for an aesthetically pleasing video edit becomes a search for the optimal genetic program. Our aesthetic criterion promotes the inclusion of people in shots, whilst penalising rapid shot changes or shot changes in the presence of camera motion. We present results on some representative home videos.