An importance measurement for video and its application to TV news items distillation

The paper presents a method to distill the important frames and shots from long duration video clips. It is based on a voluntary choice by the subject (i.e. a top down approach). First, we introduce the concept of importance measurement. We use some predefined detectable events to represent the importance inferred from the semantics of the syntax. Since the event characteristics depend largely on the video sources, we choose news program videos as our analyzing focus. Then we calculate the importance measurement of frames and shots, respectively. Experiments show that a good subjective test result for news items distillation can be obtained, and the average distillation ratios of frames and shots are 13.18% and 41.23%, respectively.