A hierarchical organization scheme for video data

Video stream is based on bits of imagery and is thus difficult to be perceived (by machine) in the content level. To access video content, a suitable organization of video data is critical. This paper proposes a hierarchical structure and a process scheme for organizing video data to facilitate indexing, browsing and querying. Four layers can be distinguished, that is: video program, episode, shot and frame. This hierarchy provides an efficient and flexible structure as well as compact and meaningful abstraction of video program. To achieve such an organization, not only the boundary detection of shots and episodes, but also the extraction of key-frames for shots and the selection of representative shots and frames for episodes are important. Suitable criteria and methods for above tasks are proposed and these techniques have been integrated into a workable system. A number of organization experiments using real video data are performed and some results are presented, which show the effectiveness of the proposed organization scheme and techniques.