Automatic video summarization based on MPEG-7 descriptions

The ever-growing amount of audiovisual content available has raised the need to develop systems allowing each of us to consume the information considered 'essential', adapted to our tastes, our preferences, our time and also to our capacities of receiving, consuming and storing that information. In other words, there is an increasing need to develop systems able to automatically summarize audiovisual information. This paper proposes a novel query-based summary creation mechanism using a relevance metric and a constraints schema implemented in the context of an automatic video summarization system based on MPEG-7 descriptions. In the context of the same system, this paper also proposes a human skin filter allowing to build summaries based on the presence or absence of human skin. This skin colour filter is based solely on the MPEG-7 Dominant Colour descriptor, which means that the content is skin filtered with a rather small amount of processing, without accessing and processing the video data. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.