A unified framework using spatial color descriptor and motion-based post refinement for shot boundary detection

We propose a unified framework which combines a novel color representation, i.e. spatial color descriptors, and a post-refinement process to detect various types of shot boundaries, including abrupt shot changes, flashlights, dissolves, fade-ins and fade-outs. The spatial color descriptor involving color adjacency and color vector angle histograms incorporates spatial information into color representation and provides robust performance in shot boundary detection. Moreover, a motionbased post-refinement process is developed to effectively eliminate false positives in gradual transition detection, where rapid camera motion or object movement may lead to performance degradation. Experimental results show that these two techniques are integrated seamlessly to give satisfactory performance and present the robustness of spatial color descriptors.