Shot boundary detection without threshold parameters

Automatic shot boundary detection is a field, where many techniques and methods have been proposed and have claimed to perform reliably, especially for abrupt scene cut detection. However, all the proposed methods share a common drawback: the necessity of a threshold value, which is used as a reference for detecting scene changes. The determination of the appropriate value or the dynamic reestimation of this threshold parameter remains the most challenging issue for the existing shot boundary detection algorithms. We introduce a novel method for shot boundary detection of discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based and low-bit-rate encoded clips, which exploits the perceptual blockiness effect detection on each frame without using any threshold parameter, therefore minimizing the processing demands required for algorithm implementation. (C) 2006 SPIE and IS&T.