Fast lead star detection in entertainment videos

Video can be summarized in many forms. One natural possibility that has been well explored is extracting key frames in shots or scenes, and then creating thumbnails. Another natural alternative that has been surprisingly ill-explored is to locate ¿lead stars¿ around whom the action revolves. Though scarce and far between, available techniques for detecting lead stars is usually video specific. In this paper, we highlight the importance of lead star detection, and present a generalized method for detecting snippets around lead actors in entertainment videos. Applications that naturally make use of this method include locating action around the `player of the match´ in sports videos, lead actors in movies and TV shows, and guest-host snippets in TV talk shows. Additionally, our method is considerably faster than the state-of-art spectral clustering technique with comparable accuracy.