In the current video analysis scenario, effective summarization of video sequences through shot clustering facilitates the access to the content and helps in understanding the associated semantics. This paper introduces a generic scheme to produce hierarchical summaries of the video document starting from a dendrogram representation of clusters of shots. The evaluation of the cluster distortions, and the exploitation of the dependency relationships between clusters on the dendrograms, allow to obtain only a few semantically significant
summaries of the whole video. Finally the user can navigate through summaries and decide which one best suites his/her needs for eventual post-processing. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by testing it on a collection of video-data from different kinds of programmes, using and comparing different visual features on color information. Results are evaluated in terms of metrics that measure the content representational value of the summarization technique
