Two-dimensional entropy model for video shot partitioning

A shot presents a contiguous action recorded by an uninterrupted camera operation and frames within a shot keep spatio-temporal coherence. Segmenting a serial video stream file into meaningful shots is the first pass for the task of video analysis, content-based video understanding. In this paper, a novel scheme based on improved two-dimensional entropy is proposed to complete the partition of video shots. Firstly, shot transition candidates are detected using a two-pass algorithm: a coarse searching pass and a fine searching pass. Secondly, with the character of two-dimensional entropy of the image, correctly detected transition candidates are further classified into different transition types whereas those falsely detected shot breaks are distinguished and removed. Finally, the boundary of gradual transition can be precisely located by merging the characters of two-dimensional entropy of the image into the gradual transition. A large number of video sequences are used to test our system performance and promising results are obtained.