Fast Frame-Based Scene Change Detection in the Compressed Domain for MPEG-4 Video

Detection of scene changes is an elementary step in automatic video processing like indexing, segmentation or transcoding. Video indexing and segmentation allow fast browsing without decoding the complete video. In the case of transcoding, the information about scene changes such as cuts and fades as well as about special movements like rotations or zooms in video frames is helpful to determine suitable transcoding parameters. In the compressed domain only information about DCT values as well as motion information can be used to determine such scene changes and movements. Therefore we defined different measures which use the encoded DCT values and motion vectors of each compressed frame. Based on these measures as well as on motion vector histograms we present a fast approach to detect different kinds of scene changes and special movements in MPEG-4 videos in the compressed domain.