Finding the cut of the wrong trousers: fast video search using automatic storyboard generation

The development of high capacity storage media and moving image file format standards (e.g. MPEG-2) have improved the quality of digital video and provided the possibility of enhanced digital video browsing techniques. This paper describes an approach to search and navigation in video databases which automatically identifies shots in a video sequence to present a single frame from each shot that best represents the shot as a whole. Using the approach a storyboard is generated which can be either visually scanned by the user, or searched using automatic techniques such as query-by-visual-example (QVE).