Copyright © 2009 Don Adjeroh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We study the problem of video shot boundary detection using an adaptive edge-oriented framework. Our approach is distinct in its use of multiple multilevel features in the required processing. Adaptation is provided by a careful analysis of these multilevel features, based on shot variability. We consider three levels of adaptation: at the feature extraction stage using locally-adaptive edge maps, at the video sequence level, and at the individual shot level. We show how to provide adaptive parameters for the multilevel edge-based approach, and how to determine adaptive thresholds for the shot boundaries based on the characteristics of the particular shot being indexed. The result is a fast adaptive scheme that provides a slightly better performance in terms of robustness, and a five fold efficiency improvement in shot characterization and classification. The reported work has applications beyond direct video indexing, and could be used in real-time applications, such as in dynamic monitoring and modeling of video data traffic in multimedia communications, and in real-time video surveillance. Experimental results are included.