Block based video alignment with linear time and space complexity

Video retrieval and video copy detection are well studied problems. The goal is to find the matching video in a database from a given query video. Typically, these query videos are short and aligning the query video is of secondary importance. Short sequences can be aligned using dynamic time warping. But, since time and memory usage increases quadratically with the length of the sequences, such process is not suitable for the alignment of two full length movies. A typical feature film is between 70 and 210 minutes long. Our goal is to find an accurate frame-by-frame alignment of a full length original film and a copy that has inserted and deleted sequences (e.g., commercial breaks or censorship), as well as differences in quality, format and framerate. We propose a fast, robust and memory efficient video sequence alignment algorithm which has linear space and time complexity.