With the fast growth ofmultimedia information, content-based video anal-
ysis, indexing and representation have attracted increasing attention in
re- cent years. Many applications have emerged in these areas such as
video- on-demand, distributed multimedia systems, digital video
libraries, distance learning/education, entertainment, surveillance and
geographical information systems. The need for content-based video
indexing and retrieval was also rec- ognized by ISOIMPEG, and a new
international standard called "Multimedia Content Description Interface"
(or in short, MPEG-7)was initialized in 1998 and finalized in September
2001. In this context, a systematic and thorough review ofexisting
approaches as well as the state-of-the-art techniques in video content
analysis, indexing and representation areas are investigated and studied
in this book. In addition, we will specifically elaborate on a system
which analyzes, indexes and abstracts movie contents based on the
integration ofmultiple media modalities. Content ofeach part ofthis book
is briefly previewed below. In the first part, we segment a video
sequence into a set ofcascaded shots, where a shot consistsofone or more
continuouslyrecorded image frames. Both raw and compressedvideo data
will beinvestigated. Moreover, consideringthat there are always
non-story units in real TV programs such as commercials, a novel
commercial break detection/extraction scheme is developed which ex-
ploits both audio and visual cues to achieve robust results.
Specifically, we first employ visual cues such as the video data
statistics, the camera cut fre- quency, and the existenceofdelimiting
black frames between commercials and programs, to obtain coarse-level
detection results.
