Temporal multi-resolution analysis for video segmentation

Video segmentation is an important step in many of the video applications. We observe that the video shot boundary is a multi-resolution edge phenomenon in the feature space. Based on this observation, we have developed a novel temporal multi-resolution analysis (TMRA) based algorithm using Canny wavelets to perform temporal video segmentation. Information across multiple resolutions is used to help detect as well as locate abrupt and gradual transtions. We present the theoretical basis of the algorithm followed by the implementation as well as the results. In this paper the TMRA technique has been implemented using color histogram in the raw domain and DCT coefficients in the compressed video streams as the feature space. Experimental results shows that this method can detect as well as characterize both the abrupt and gradual shot boundaries. The technique also shows good noise tolerance characteristics.