An effective method for video segmentation and sub-shot characterization

It is important to detect shot and sub-shot changes, which are the fundamental units of video sequences, in video indexing techniques. In this paper, a unified method for detecting shot and sub-shot changes is proposed using a background image. There are two steps used to detect shot changes. In the first step, pixel-wise differences using a new criterion are used to screen out less likely scene changes. The second step is based on the percentage of pixels having motion vectors different from the background image, and is applied to the candidate frames from the first step. To detect sub-shot changes, camera motion parameters are estimated from the background images. The experimental results show that the proposed method is robust and accurate in detecting shot and sub-shot changes.