Classification, simplification and dynamic visualization of scene transition graphs for video browsing

The Scene Transition Graph (STG) [1] is a directed graph structure that compactly captures both image content and temporal flow of video. An STG offers a condensed view of the story content, serves as the summary of the clip represented, and allows nonlinear access to its story element. It can serve as a valuable tool for both the analysis of video structure and presentation of high level visual summary for video browsing applications. In this paper, we study new techniques for classification and simplification of the STG, and present better means of visualizing the graph through dynamic visual display and simplified structures. In other words, our techniques improve significantly the existing graph structure to enable more succinct presentation of the graphs which leads to more efficient utilization of the screen spaces. In addition, a technique that captures and presents visually the temporal dynamics of the video sequence is described. We have tested the graph visualization techniques on various programming types and the new tools are found to effectively handle video from a wider variety than the existing STG structure.