Novel automatic video cut detection technique using Gabor filtering

Video shot transition identification constitutes an important computer vision research field, being applied, as an essential step, in many other digital video analysis domains: video scene detection, video compression, video indexing, video content retrieval and video object tracking. This paper approaches the video cut transition detection domain, providing a novel feature-based automatic identification method. We propose a feature extraction technique that uses 2D Gabor filtering, computing tridimensional image feature vectors for the video frames. Most shot cut detection techniques use a thresholding operation to discriminate between the inter-frame difference metric values and thus identify the video break points. Our identification approach is not threshold-based, using an automatic unsupervised distance classification procedure instead of a threshold. Thus, we provide a region-growing based classification approach, that proves to be very efficient in clustering the distances between feature vectors of consecutive frames. The two resulted distance classes determine a satisfactory video shot detection. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.