Comparison of MPEG domain elements for low-level shot boundary detection

The goal of this paper is to justify the reliability of the different eleme nts in the compressed domain used in low-level shot boundary detection. Thr ee elements at different level of decoding, namely, chromatic barycenter, l uminance and macroblock size information, are extracted from MPEG video for examination. Overviews with analysis of each element are done, followed by a global threshold sensitivity and detection performance test. To detect t he stability of the elements under different circumstances, we utilized sta tistical methods to compare the different elements, and each element is tes ted with video clips from different fields. We found that both macroblock s ize and luminance elements could be unstable under certain conditions, and detection in the color domain is essential for accurate shot boundary detec tion. By utilizing the approximation for chromatic barycenter, fast and acc urate shot boundary detection could be achieved. (C) 1999 Academic Press.