Automatic freeze frame detection for video preservation

A significant amount of work in film and video preservation is dedicated to quality assessment of the content to be archived or reused out of the archive. This paper proposes automatic content analysis algorithms which reduce manual inspection time in software based preservation environments. We list the requirements for such algorithms and tools and show exemplarily on a freeze frame impairment detector how analysis algorithms need to be designed for meeting the requirements. The evaluation has shown that robustness against other impairments (noise and flickering) is an essential part of the algorithm. Successful detection of freeze frame impairments with a minimum length of three frames is achieved. The consideration of human perception is important to achieve low false detection rates. Analysis results are represented in a MPEG-7 standard compliant way. The proposed defect summary visualization tool enables efficient human exploration of visually impaired content.