Semantic-event based analysis and segmentation of wedding ceremony videos

Abstract

Wedding is one of the most important ceremonies in our lives. It symbolizes the birth and creation of a new family. In this paper, we present a system for automatically segmenting a wedding ceremony video into a sequence of recognized wedding events, e.g., the couple's wedding kiss. Our goal is to develop an automatic tool for users to efficiently organize, search, and retrieve his/her treasured wedding memories. Furthermore, the event descriptions could benefit and complement the current research in semantic video understanding. Technically, three kinds of event features, i.e., the speech/music discriminator, flashlight detector, and bride indicator, are exploited to build statistical models for each wedding event. Events are then recognized by a hidden Markov model, which takes into account both the fitness of observed features and the temporal rationality of event ordering to improve the segmentation accuracy. We conducted experiments on a rich set of wedding videos, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.