Hybrid Rule-Based/Neural Approach for Segmentation of MPEG Compressed Video

An approach for video segmentation into shots and sub-shots that works directly in the MPEG compressed domain is presented. It is based only on the information about macroblock coding mode and motion vectors in P and B frames. The system follows a two-pass scheme and has a hybrid rule-based/neural structure. A rough scan over the P frames locates the potential shot boundaries and the solution is then refined by a precise scan over the B frames of the respective neighborhoods. The simpler boundaries are recognized by the rule-based module, while the decisions for the complex ones are refined by the neural part. The latter is also used to distinguish dissolves from object and camera motions and to further divide shots into sub-shots. The experiments demonstrate high speed and classification accuracy without computationally expensive calculations and need for many thresholds.