An Illumination Effect Descriptor for Video Sequences

Abstract

In the context of indexing of video data bases, the future standard MPEG-7 will provide descriptors for motion, shape, texture, and color to identify video scenes. In this paper, an illumination effect descriptor is presented that has been proposed to MPEG-7. Effects caused by scene illumination can be a useful feature for video indexing. The proposed descriptor addresses temporal changes of object shading, of cast shadows, and of the global illumination intensity by one scalar. It is based on temporal changes of image luminance along motion trajectories. Further, an automatic, noise adaptive method for extraction of the illumination effect descriptor from a video sequence is presented. Performance analysis and sample retrieval experiments show that extracted descriptor values are sufficiently precise and sensible to distinguish video sequences with different scene illumination.