Animation movies trailer computation

Abstract

This paper presents a method for the automatic generation of animation movie trailers. First, the movie is divided into shots, by detecting the video transitions (cuts, fades and dissolves) and an animation movie specific color effect named short color change or SCC (i.e. explosions, thunders). The movie action content is further highlighted by analyzing the movie at two different granularity levels. First, an inter-shot analysis is performed by measuring the video transition temporal distribution. As repetitive shot changes are related to action, we define as an action shot, a movie segment containing a high shot change ratio. On the other hand, an inter-frame analysis is performed: for each shot within an action shot, an histogram of cumulative inter-frame distances is computed to serve as a measure of the frame spatial activity. Repetitive color changes are also related to action. Since movie trailers only show some of the most attractive movie scenes, the proposed trailer is a moving-image abstract computed on the retained action shots. It provides the user with a compact and efficient representation of the movie action content. The proposed approach was tested on several animation movies.