Sudden scene change detection in MPEG-2 video sequences

Content based indexing and retrieval of video is becoming increasingly important in many applications. Identifying scene changes and special effects in a video scene is an essential pre-requisite for automatic indexing. This paper presents a real time algorithm, which can detect abrupt scene changes in the compressed domain. It is based on the number of interpolated macroblocks (MBs) for a given B-frame as the main feature since it expresses a measure of how strong the previous and future I or P (I/P) frames are correlated. Experimental results show that this algorithm can detect most abrupt scene changes in MPEG-2 compressed video.