Patent ID: 8724957

Claim:
A method performed by a computer of selecting parts of an audiovisual document comprising the steps of: analyzing the audiovisual document by at least two different subdividing means, the at least two subdividing means producing two different groups of sequences extracted from the audiovisual document, wherein one of the at least two subdividing means subdivides the audiovisual document into hierarchical shots associated to predefined meaningful semantic units, by using a priori knowledge of a hierarchical intrinsic structure of a type of content contained in the audiovisual document; the other of the at least two subdividing means subdivides the audiovisual document into sequences and indexes them according to event types of the audiovisual document; entering at least two sequence selection criteria, each specific to one of the at least two subdividing means, wherein one of said sequence selection criteria includes at least one hierarchical shot and the other of said at least two sequence selection criteria includes elements different from the hierarchical structure of the content; and selecting at least one sequence if at least one part of said sequence meets each of the at least two sequence selection criteria from each of the at least two different subdividing means further comprising a step for generating a satisfaction index assigned to a sequence generated by one of the subdividing means; said index being a selection criterion.