Detecting fade regions in uncompressed video sequences

The use of fade in video production to smooth scene changes and enhance the video quality complicates subsequent video compression or video editing. It is important to detect the fade regions in order to improve the quality of the compressed video or to allow automatic parsing of the video for the purpose of editing and database indexing. A fade detector that exploits the changes in the average luminosities as well as the semi-parabolic behavior of the variances of the frames in the fade region is developed. Simulation results indicate that the developed detector has over a 95% reliability rate.