A semantic event-detection approach and its application to detecting hunts in wildlife video

We propose a three-level video-event detection methodology and apply it to animal-hunt detection in wildlife documentaries. The first level extracts color, texture, and motion features, and detects shot boundaries and moving object blobs. The mid-level employs a neural network to determine the object class of the moving object blobs. This level also generates shot descriptors that combine features from the first level and inferences from the mid-level. The shot descriptors are then used by the domain-specific inference process at the third level to detect video segments that match the user defined event model. The proposed approach has been applied to the detection of hunts in wildlife documentaries. Our method can be applied to different events by adapting the classifier at the intermediate level and by specifying a new event model at the highest level. Event-based video indexing, summarization, and browsing are among the applications of the proposed approach.