Motion Insensitive Detection of Cuts and Gradual Transitions in Digital Videos

This paper concerns shot boundary detection in digital video. Automatic video segmentation is a first step towards video indexing. An efficient yet robust algorithm is needed to separate video sequences into smaller segments called shots. Although many researchers have tackled the problem of finding shot boundaries, few have been able to accurately detect gradual transition boundaries such as fades and dissolves. Because shot boundaries correspond to discontinuities in the time domain, we present an algorithm based on the video’s first-order partial derivatives. By only considering areas with low apparent motion, our method is insensitive to object or camera motion. Our algorithm can accurately detect cuts as well as fades, dissolves, wipes and other gradual transitions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other popular methods on our sample videos.