Patent ID: 7016540

Claim:
A method for summarizing a content of an input video sequence, said method comprising: (a) computing a feature vector for each frame in a set of frames from said input video sequence; (b) applying singular value decomposition to a matrix comprised of said feature vectors and projecting the matrix on a refined feature space representation, wherein positions of said projections on said refined feature space representation represent approximations of visual changes in said set of frames from said input video sequence; (c) clustering said frames of said input video sequence based upon positions of said projections on said refined feature space representation; (d) selecting a frame from each cluster to serve as a keyframe in a summarization of said input video sequence; and (e) using said clustered frames to output a motion video representative of a summary of said input video sequence, wherein said input video sequence summary is composed according to a time-length parameter T len and a minimum display time parameter T min by: locating the video shot Θ i in each cluster S i having the greatest length; determining how the video shots in each cluster will be arranged according to C≦N=T len /T min , wherein C represents a number of clusters; and wherein N represents the maximum number of video shots; if C≦N, then all the video shots in each cluster is included in said input video sequence summary; and if C≦N, then sort each video shot Θ i from each cluster S i in descending order by length, select the first N video shots for inclusion in said input video sequence summary and assign time length T min to each selected video shot.