An improved algorithm for anchor shot detection

Segmentation of news videos into stories is among key issues for achieving efficient treatment of news-based digital libraries. Indeed, anchor shot detection is a fundamental step for segmenting news into stories. In this paper we present an improved algorithm for anchor shot detection. It is based on a graph theoretical clustering method and exploits the idea of the cluster lifetime for improving the performance. Moreover, a method for automatically fixing all the thresholds required by the original version of the algorithm is also proposed, so making it fully unsupervised. The proposed algorithm has been tested on a database significantly wider than those typically used in the field, demonstrating its advantages with respect to the original version.