Scene extraction in motion pictures

This paper addresses the challenge of bridging the semantic gap between the rich meaning users desire when they query to locate and browse media and the shallowness of media descriptions that can be computed in today\u27s content management systems. To facilitate high-level semantics-based content annotation and interpretation, we tackle the problem of automatic decomposition of motion pictures into meaningful story units, namely scenes. Since a scene is a complicated and subjective concept, we first propose guidelines from fill production to determine when a scene change occurs. We then investigate different rules and conventions followed as part of Fill Grammar that would guide and shape an algorithmic solution for determining a scene. Two different techniques using intershot analysis are proposed as solutions in this paper. In addition, we present different refinement mechanisms, such as film-punctuation detection founded on Film Grammar, to further improve the results. These refinement techniques demonstrate significant improvements in overall performance. Furthermore, we analyze errors in the context of film-production techniques, which offer useful insights into the limitations of our method

Visual analysis for drum sequence transcription

A system is presented for analysing drum performance video sequences. A novel ellipse detection algorithm is introduced that automatically locates drum tops. This algorithm fits ellipses to edge clusters, and ranks them according to various fitness criteria. A background/foreground segmentation method is then used to extract the silhouette of the drummer and drum sticks. Coupled with a motion intensity feature, this allows for the detection of ‘hits’ in each of the extracted regions. In order to obtain a transcription of the performance, each of these regions is automatically labeled with the corresponding instrument class. A partial audio transcription and color cues are used to measure the compatibility between a region and its label, the Kuhn-Munkres algorithm is then employed to find the optimal labeling. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of visual analysis to enhance the performance of an audio drum transcription system