Abstract
This thesis describes the implementation of automatic shot boundary detection algorithms for the detection of cuts and gradual transitions in digital video sequences. The objective was to develop a fully automatic video segmentation system as a pre-processing step for video database retrieval management systems as well as other applications which has large video sequences as part of their systems. For die detection of cuts, we begin by looking at a set of baseline algorithms that look into measuring specific features of video images and calculating the dissimilarity of the measures between frames in the video sequence. We then propose two different approaches and compare them against the set of baseline algorithms. These approaches are themselves built upon the base set of algorithms. Observing that the baseline algorithms initially use hard thresholds to determine shot boundaries, we build Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves to plot the characteristics of the algorithms when varying the thresholds. In the first approach, we look into combining the multiple algorithms in such a way that as a collective, the detection of cuts are improved. The results of the fusion are then compared against the baseline algorithms on the ROC curve. For the second approach, we look into having adaptive thresholds for the baseline algorithms. A selection of adaptive thresholding methods were applied to the data set and compared with the baseline algorithms that are using hard thresholds. In the case of gradual transition detection, an application of a filtering technique used to detect ramp edges in images is adapted for use in video sequences. The approach is taken by starting with the observation that shot boundaries represent edges in time, with cuts being sharp edges and gradual transitions closely approximating ramp edges. The methods that we propose reflect our concentration on producing a reliable and efficient shot boundary detection mechanism. In each instance, be it for cuts or gradual transitions, we tested our algorithms on a comprehensive set of video sequences, containing a variety of content and obtained highly competitive results.