An efficient method for video shot boundary detection and keyframe extraction using SIFT-point distribution histogram

In today’s digital era, there are large volumes of long-duration videos resulting from movies, documentaries, sports and surveillance cameras floating over internet and video databases (YouTube). Since manual processing of these videos are difficult, time-consuming and expensive, an automatic technique of abstracting these long-duration videos are very much desirable. In this backdrop, this paper presents a novel and efficient approach of video shot boundary detection and keyframe extraction, which subsequently leads to a summarized and compact video. The proposed method detects video shot boundaries by extracting the SIFT-point distribution histogram (SIFT-PDH) from the frames as a combination of local and global features. In the subsequent step, using the distance of SIFT-PDH of consecutive frames and an adaptive threshold video shot boundaries are detected. Further, the keyframes representing the salient content of each segmented shot are extracted using entropy-based singular values measure. Thus, the summarized video is then generated by combining the extracted keyframes. The experimental results show that our method can efficiently detect shot boundaries under both abrupt and gradual transitions, and even under different levels of illumination, motion effects and camera operations (zoom in, zoom out and camera rotation). With the proposed method, the computational complexity is comparatively less and video summarization is very compact.