Analysis of Unstructured Video Based on Camera Motion

Although considerable work has been done in management of “structured” video such as movies, sports, and television programs that has known scene structures, “unstructured” video analysis is still a challenging problem due to its unrestricted nature. The purpose of this paper is to address issues in the analysis of unstructured video and in particular video shot by a typical unprofessional user (i.e home video). We describe how one can make use of camera motion information for unstructured video analysis. A new concept, “camera viewing direction,” is introduced as the building block of home video analysis. Motion displacement vectors are employed to temporally segment the video based on this concept. We then find the correspondence between the camera behavior with respect to the subjective importance of the information in each segment and describe how different patterns in the camera motion can indicate levels of interest in a particular object or scene. By extracting these patterns, the most representative frames, keyframes, for the scenes are determined and aggregated to summarize the video sequence.