Gradual shot change detection in soccer videos via fractals

Accurate shot change detection plays vital role to organize video contents into meaningful parts for video scene analysis. Shot changes may occur with either abrupt or gradual shot transition. In abrupt shot transition, the change of video content occurs over a single frame. In gradual shot transition, however, the content change takes place gradually through a short sequence of frames. The gradual transition is also divided into several subgroups such as dissolve, pan, zoom and wipe. In the literature, there exist numerous methods to detect shot changes. While these methods are able to detect abrupt changes properly, they usually fail to detect gradual changes. This paper proposes a new method for detecting gradual shot changes successfully. The proposed method employs fractal dimension information of gray scale video frames. In the experimental work, efficacy of fractal based gradual shot change detection method is tested on soccer videos including different types of gradual shot changes and compared with well known pixel and histogram based shot change detection methods. Results of the experimental study indicate that the proposed method yields higher accuracy with respect to other methods in most cases.