Patent ID: 6393054
Filing Date: 2002-05-21
Classification: G11B,H04N

Abstract:
A system for detecting shot boundaries in a compressed video data, comprising:(A) a difference detector that detects content differences between a current frame and previous frames of previous groups of frames; (B) a sharp shot boundary detector to detect a sharp shot boundary between the current frame and a previous frame of a first previous group of frames when the difference detector determines that a first content difference between the current frame and the previous frame of the first previous group of frames is greater than a first threshold; (C) a gradual shot boundary detector that detects a gradual shot boundary between the current frame and a previous frame of a second previous group of frames when the difference detector determines that (1) the first content difference is not greater than the first threshold and (2) a second content difference between the current frame and the previous frame of the second previous group of frames is greater than a second threshold; and (D) a key frame extractor that extracts multiple key frames from a detected shot using an iterative algorithm, wherein the iterative algorithm allows the key frame extractor to extract the multiple key frames from the shot by (a) selecting the multiple key frames within the shot at a constant interval; (b) adjusting the location of the selected key frames based on their histograms and the histograms of their adjacent frames within the shot until the histogram of a key frame is substantially the same as that of its subsequent frames.