A NOVEL TECHNIQUE FOR SIZE CONSTRAINED VIDEO STORYBOARD GENERATION USING STATISTICAL RUN TEST AND SPANNING TREE

Abstract

Storyboard consisting of key-frames is a popular format of video summarization as it helps in efficient indexing, browsing and partial or complete retrieval of video. In this paper, we have presented a size constrained storyboard generation scheme. Given the shots i.e. the output of the video segmentation process, the method has two major steps: extraction of appropriate key-frame(s) from each shot and finally, selection of a specified number of key-frames from the set thus obtained. The set of selected key-frames should retain the variation in visual content originally possessed by the video. The number of key-frames or representative frames in a shot may vary depending on the variation in its visual content. Thus, automatic selection of suitable number of representative frames from a shot still remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a novel scheme for detecting the sub-shots, having consistent visual content, from a shot using Wald–Wolfowitz runs test. Then from each sub-shot a frame rendering the highest fidelity is extracted as key-frame. Finally, a spanning tree based novel method is proposed to select a subset of key-frames having specific cardinality. Chronological arrangement of such frames generates the size constrained storyboard. Experimental result and comparative study show that the scheme works satisfactorily for a wide variety of shots. Moreover, the proposed technique rectifies mis-detection error, if any, incurred in video segmentation process. Similarly, though not implemented, the proposed hypothesis test has ability to rectify the false-alarm in shot detection if it is applied on pair of adjacent shots.