Hierarchical video summarization based on context clustering

A personalized video summary is dynamically generated in our video personalization and summarization system based on user preference and usage environment. The three-tier personalization system adopts the server-middleware-client architecture in order to maintain, select, adapt, and deliver rich media content to the user. The server stores the content sources along with their corresponding MPEG-7 metadata descriptions. In this paper, the metadata includes visual semantic annotations and automatic speech transcriptions. Our personalization and summarization engine in the middleware selects the optimal set of desired video segments by matching shot annotations and sentence transcripts with user preferences. Besides finding the desired contents, the objective is to present a coherent summary. There are diverse methods for creating summaries, and we focus on the challenges of generating a hierarchical video summary based on context information. In our summarization algorithm, three inputs are used to generate the hierarchical video summary output. These inputs are (1) MPEG-7 metadata descriptions of the contents in the server, (2) user preference and usage environment declarations from the user client, and (3) context information including MPEG-7 controlled term list and classification scheme. In a video sequence, descriptions and relevance scores are assigned to each shot. Based on these shot descriptions, context clustering is performed to collect consecutively similar shots to correspond to hierarchical scene representations. The context clustering is based on the available context information, and may be derived from domain knowledge or rules engines. Finally, the selection of structured video segments to generate the hierarchical summary efficiently balances between scene representation and shot selection.