Efficient MPEG Compressed Video Analysis Using Macroblock Type Information

Efficient indexing methods are required to handle the rapidly increasing amount of visual information within video databases. Video analysis that partitions the video into clips or extracts interesting frames is an important preprocessing step for video indexing. In this paper, we develop a novel method for video analysis using the macroblock (MB) type information of MPEG compressed video bitstreams. This method exploits the comparison operations performed in the motion estimation procedure, which results in specific characteristics of the MB type information when scene changes occur or some special effects are applied. Only a simple analysis on MB types of frames is needed to achieve very fast scene change, gradual transition, flashlight, and caption detection. The advantages of this novel approach are its direct extraction from the MPEG bitstreams after VLC decoding, very low complexity analysis, frame-based detection accuracy and high sensitivity.