A Motion Picture Archiving Technique, and Its Application in an Ethnology Museum

This paper introduces database utilities for archiving motion pictures, and describes a prototype system called M-CIDB (Motion Color Image Data Base). There are two crucial problems in implementing motion picture archives: (1) scene indexing and database creation is time-consuming and error-prone, and (2) searching for scenes of interest is slow and awkward. The following techniques for solving the problems are proposed: (1) scene information structures including scene hierarchy and time-axis-based annotations for fast and random scene access, (2) automatic scene change detection and automatic representative frame image selection from all the original consecutive frame sequences, and (3) an interactive scene information editor for verifying and editing automatically detected scene information through a graphical user interface. A prototype system has been built and applied to an ethnology museum’s motion video in a preliminary feasibility study.