Movie abstraction and content understanding tool based on shot boundary key frame selection

Movie abstraction tools will soon become very popular applications that help users quickly understand the content of a movie before buying or downloading. Abstraction is a lightweight representation of the original movie content. There are two types of abstraction: summarization and skimming. In this paper we describe an improved tool for movie content abstraction and understanding. Basically, this tool is a hierarchical summarization one. The movie content is described at different levels of details. To some extent, summary and skimming features are both embodied in this tool. Adding audio samples to accompany key frames significantly increases effectiveness of this tool. It makes the resulting abstraction more informative and interesting from the user's point of view.