A Multi-expert System for Movie Segmentation

In this paper we present a system for movie segmentation based on the automatic detection of dialogue scenes.The proposed system processes the video stream directly in the MPEG domain: it starts with the segmentation of the video footage in shots. Then, a characterization of each shot between dialogue and not-dialogue according to a Multi-Expert System (MES) is performed. Finally, the individuated sequences of shots are aggregated in dialogue scenes by means of a suitable algorithm. The MES integrates three experts, which classifies a given shot on the basis of very complementary descriptions; in particular an audio classifier, a face detector and a camera motion estimator have been built up and employed.The performance of the system have been tested on a huge MPEG movie database made up of more than 15000 shots and 200 scenes, giving rise to encouraging results.