Film semantic analysis

In the paper the problem of video segmentation and semantic analysis for video indexing and cinematographic language classification is addressed. Large archives of video sequences will remain a largely unexploitable resource of information, unless a straightforward way to describe their content is designed. The first step to be considered in this direction is the highlighting of the syntactic units of the visual speech. Therefore, video segmentation must focus on the editing procedures, through which the shots are fused into the video stream. This work proposes a statistically based new data-driven algorithm to detect cuts between two shots in a video sequence. On the contrary, the analysis of how the other editing techniques are performed, supplies a mathematical model, upon which the algorithms for the detection of fades, dissolves and mattes are based. A second part of this work is devoted to a higher level analysis, which involves the semantics of a film. On the basis of the common film editing rules, a method is presented to detect when a set of shots has unitary meaning. Experimental validation of the techniques proposed is thereby presented.