High accuracy flashlight scene determination for shot boundary detection

Abstract

Shot boundary detection, or scene change detection, is a technique used in the initial phase of video indexing. One of the problems in the detection is the discrimination of abrupt scene change from flashlight scenes. The usual discriminate method tests the similarity of the frame before and after a suspected flashlight effect. However, the performance of such a technique in discriminating flashlight scene from abrupt scene change can be affected by the scene content. To overcome this, we present a novel method that utilises the edge direction, thereby reducing erroneous matching with increasing dilation radius. This improves the accuracy of similarity testing and reduces the amount of erroneously matched edges by four times. Our experiment in discriminating flashlight effect from abrupt scene change frame pairs shows that our technique produces a perfect detection, which cannot be achieved by normal edge-based detection. Such a contribution is important as it improves the indexing of real life video.