Non-linear approach to shot boundary detection

Shot boundary detection (SBD) is the first fundamental step to managing video databases. It segments video data into the basic units for indexing and retrieval. Many automatic SBD techniques exist. They, however, are based on sequential search, and therefore too expensive for practical use. To address this problem, we explore a different direction to SBD in this paper. We investigate a non-linear approach in which most video frames do not need to be compared. This idea is fundamentally different from all existing methods. In fact, it is orthogonal to these schemes in the sense that it can be applied to substantially improve their performance. Our experiments show that this idea speeds up a conventional method based on color histograms up to 16 times while preserving the same accuracy. On the average, the improvement is five times according to our experiments on 26 videos of six different types.