Effective Fades and Flashlight Detection Based on Accumulating Histogram Difference

Scene change detection is a fundamental step in automatic video indexing, browsing and retrieval. Fade in and fade out are two kinds of gradually changing scenes which are difficult to be detected in comparison with the abruptly changing scenes. The salient character of flashlight effect is the luminance change, which is caused by abrupt appearance or disappearance of the illumination source. Performance of shot boundary detection is not satisfactory for the video sequences containing flashlights, if no flashlight discrimination strategy is adopted. In this paper, an effective fades and flashlight detection method is proposed for both the compressed and uncompressed videos, based on the accumulating histogram difference (AHD). This fades detection method is proposed in terms of their mathematical models. AHDs of all the two consecutive frames during fades transitions can be classified into six cases. The flashlight detection method is proposed based on the AHD and the energy variation characters. AHD and energy variation characters for the starting and ending frames of a flashlight have certain regularities, which can also be expressed by cases. Thus the fades and flashlight detection problems are converted into cases matching ones. Experimental results on several test video sequences with different bit rates show the effectiveness of the proposed AHD based fades and flashlight detection method