Improved Cut Detection for the Segmentation of Animation Movies

Abstract

In this paper an improved cut detection algorithm, adapted to the segmentation of animation movies, is proposed. As color is a major feature of animation movies (each movie has its own particular color distribution) the proposed algorithm applies second order derivatives on Euclidean distance between color histograms of frames quadrants in order to improve the cut detection. For the frame classification, an automatic threshold estimation is proposed. Also, in order to reduce false detections, we propose an algorithm to detect an effect specific to animation movies, named short color change (i.e. thunders, lightening). The resulting method achieved better results compared to the classical histogram–based and motion–discontinuity based approaches, as shown by tests conducted on several animation movies.