Family tries

My younger brother , you know, was the best one of us. Yeah, he frigging was, so no one say a word about him and what he done, right. H e got onto an A-grade Rugby League club team and we used to see him real as life on the telly on Sunday. Yep, there he was in all his glory in all our glory. H e even got into the papers too. Got a great shot of him still. There he lies stretched out full length along the ground, the soles of his boots showing, his arms fully out though with the elbows bent just a little to ease his fall, but you know what, his effing face is turned to the camera. H e knows that that was good. It was too, the try of the week. Great picture, that's why I keep it, as does mum and dad. H e was bloody brilliant, but with his fame came the girls from better suburbs than ours can ever hope to be. Finally, got himself hitched to a fancy bitch whose folks had money in the bank and possibly owned the bloody thing too. Well, it was like that, but he should've stuck with his own kind, though they ain't much better. I should know, because of what lately happened to me. By the way, my name is Rose, and I've got thorns as more than one has found out to his grief...

A probabilistic framework for extracting narrative act boundaries and semantics in motion pictures

This work constitutes the first attempt to extract the important narrative structure, the 3-Act storytelling paradigm in film. Widely prevalent in the domain of film, it forms the foundation and framework in which a film can be made to function as an effective tool for story telling, and its extraction is a vital step in automatic content management for film data. The identification of act boundaries allows for structuralizing film at a level far higher than existing segmentation frameworks, which include shot detection and scene identification, and provides a basis for inferences about the semantic content of dramatic events in film. A novel act boundary likelihood function for Act 1 and 2 is derived using a Bayesian formulation under guidance from film grammar, tested under many configurations and the results are reported for experiments involving 25 full-length movies. The result proves to be a useful tool in both the automatic and semi-interactive setting for semantic analysis of film, with potential application to analogues occuring in many other domains, including news, training video, sitcoms.

Finding the beat : an analysis of the rhythmic elements of motion pictures

This paper presents a new study on the application of the framework of Computational Media Aesthetics to the problem of automated understanding of film. Leveraging Film Grammar as the means to closing the "semantic gap" in media analysis, we examine film rhythm, a powerful narrative concept used to endow structure and form to the film compositionally and enhance its lyrical quality experientially. The novelty of this paper lies in the specification and investigation of the rhythmic elements that are present in two cinematic devices; namely motion and editing patterns, and their potential usefulness to automated content annotation and management systems. In our rhythm model, motion behavior is classified as being either nonexistent, fluid or staccato for a given shot. Shot neighborhoods in movies are then grouped by proportional makeup of these motion behavioral classes to yield seven high-level rhythmic arrangements that prove to be adept at indicating likely scene content (e.g. dialogue or chase sequence) in our experiments. The second part of our investigation presents a computational model to detect editing patterns as either metric, accelerated, decelerated or free. Details of the algorithm for the extraction of these classes are presented, along with experimental results on real movie data. We show with an investigation of combined rhythmic patterns that, while detailed content identification via rhythm types alone is not possible by virtue of the fact that film is not codified to this level in terms of rhythmic elements, analysis of the combined motion/editing rhythms can allow us to determine that the content has changed and hypothesize as to why this is so. We present three such categories of change and demonstrate their efficacy for capturing useful film elements (e.g. scene change precipitated by plot event), by providing data support from five motion pictures.

Toward automatic extraction of expressive elements from motion pictures : tempo

This paper addresses the challenge of bridging the semantic gap that exists between the simplicity of features that can be currently computed in automated content indexing systems and the richness of semantics in user queries posed for media search and retrieval. It proposes a unique computational approach to extraction of expressive elements of motion pictures for deriving high-level semantics of stories portrayed, thus enabling rich video annotation and interpretation. This approach, motivated and directed by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, as a first step toward demonstrating its effectiveness, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are defined and derived for a number of full-length movies and edge analysis is performed leading to the extraction of dramatic story sections and events signaled by their unique tempo. The results confirm tempo as a useful high-level semantic construct in its own right and a promising component of others such as rhythm, tone or mood of a film. In addition to the development of this computable tempo measure, a study is conducted as to the usefulness of biasing it toward either of its constituents, namely, motion or shot length. Finally, a refinement is made to the shot length normalizing mechanism, driven by the peculiar characteristics of shot length distribution exhibited by movies. Results of these additional studies, and possible applications and limitations are discussed.

Improved fade and dissolve detection for reliable video segmentation

We present improved algorithms for automatic fade and dissolve detection in digital video analysis. We devise new two-step algorithms for fade and dissolve detection and introduce a method for eliminating false positives from a list of detected candidate transitions. In our detailed study of these gradual shot transitions, our objective has been to accurately classify the type of transitions (fade-in, fade-out, and dissolve) and to precisely locate the boundary of the transitions. This distinguishes our work from early work in scene change detection which focuses on identifying the existence of a transition rather than its precise temporal extent. We evaluate our algorithms against two other commonly used methods on a comprehensive data set, and demonstrate the improved performance due to our enhancements.

Novel approach to determining tempo and dramatic story sections in motion pictures

This paper presents an original computational approach to extraction of movie tempo for deriving story sections and events that convey high level semantics of stories portrayed in motion pictures, thus enabling better video annotation and interpretation systems. This approach, inspired by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel continuous measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are derived for several full-length motion pictures and edge detection is performed to extract dramatic story sections and events occurring in the movie, underlined by their unique tempo. The results confirm reliable detection of actual distinct tempo changes and serve as useful index into the dramatic development and narration of the story in motion pictures.

Towards automatic extraction of expressive elements from motion pictures : tempo

This paper proposes a unique computational approach to extraction of expressive elements of motion pictures for deriving high level semantics of stories portrayed, thus enabling better video annotation and interpretation systems. This approach, motivated and directed by the existing cinematic conventions known as film grammar, as a first step towards demonstrating its effectiveness, uses the attributes of motion and shot length to define and compute a novel measure of tempo of a movie. Tempo flow plots are defined and derived for four full-length movies and edge analysis is performed leading to the extraction of dramatic story sections and events signaled by their unique tempo. The results confirm tempo as a useful attribute in its own right and a promising component of semantic constructs such as tone or mood of a film.

New enhancements to cut, fade, and dissolve detection processes in video segmentation

We present improved algorithms for cut, fade, and dissolve detection which are fundamental steps in digital video analysis. In particular, we propose a new adaptive threshold determination method that is shown to reduce artifacts created by noise and motion in scene cut detection. We also describe new two-step algorithms for fade and dissolve detection, and introduce a method for eliminating false positives from a list of detected candidate transitions. In our detailed study of these gradual shot transitions, our objective has been to accurately classify the type of transitions (fade-in, fade-out, and dissolve) and to precisely locate the boundary of the transitions. This distinguishes our work from other early work in scene change detection which tends to focus primarily on identifying the existence of a transition rather than its precise temporal extent. We evaluate our improved algorithms against two other commonly used shot detection techniques on a comprehensive data set, and demonstrate the improved performance due to our enhancements.

Detection of setting and subject information in documentary video

Interpretation of video information is a difficult task for computer vision and machine intelligence. In this paper we examine the utility of a non-image based source of information about video contents, namely the shot list, and study its use in aiding image interpretation. We show how the shot list may be analysed to produce a simple summary of the 'who and where' of a documentary or interview video. In order to detect the subject of a video we use the notion of a 'shot syntax' of a particular genre to isolate actual interview sections.

An embedded suggestive interface for making home videos

This paper describes a novel suggestive interface embedded in a smart camera prototype aimed at aiding home movie makers. We focus on the problem of generating shot capture suggestions suitable to the user's filming context, intended audience and style, and formulate a novel aesthetic measure by which to judge proposed suggestions. Tight coupling between media and software allows the aesthetic measure to be sensitive to previous footage captures, including those taken without the system's prompting, in a manner allowing flexible, end-to-end migration of the authoring task from user to machine. An approximate method is used to find timely, near-optimal solutions to the aesthetic measure. Qualitative evaluation in the form of a user study shows it to be a promising approach to the flexible home movie authoring context.

Finding the optimal temporal partitioning of video sequences

The existing techniques for shot partitioning either process each shot boundary independently or proceed sequentially. The sequential process assumes the last shot boundary is correctly detected and utilizes the shot length distribution to adapt the threshold for detecting the next boundary. These techniques are only locally optimal and suffer from the strong assumption about the correct detection of the last boundary. Addressing these fundamental issues, in this paper, we aim to find the global optimal shot partitioning by utilizing Bayesian principles to model the probability of a particular video partition being the shot partition. A computationally efficient algorithm based on Dynamic Programming is then formulated. The experimental results on a large movie set show that our algorithm performs consistently better than the best adaptive-thresholding technique commonly used for the task.

Director in your pocket : holistic help for the hapless home videographer

We present a new aspect of our ongoing research aimed at providing technology for the amateur home videographer. We aim to enable the production of quality video presentations that are well structured and use the expressive properties of the medium to full effect, regardless of the technical or artistic abilities of the user. This task requires that help be given to the user at or before capture time. We use a PDA platform to deliver 3d visualizations of shot directives, instructions to the user about the type of footage to capture, and discuss issues connected with realizing high-level representations in concrete first person animations. Additionally, we discuss the mechanism for mating that metadata with captured footage and implementation issues.

Discovering semantics from visualizations of film takes

In this paper, we study the application of a scene structure visualizing technique called Double-Ring Take-Transition-Diagram (DR-TTD). This technique presents takes and their transitions during a film scene via nodes and edges of a 'graph' consisting of two rings as its backbone. We describe how certain filmic elements such as montage, centre/cutaway, dialogue, temporal flow, zone change, dramatic progression, shot association, scene introduction, scene resolution, master shot and editing orchestration can be identified from a scene through the signature arrangements of nodes and edges in the DR-TTD.

Application of computational media aesthetics methodology to extracting color semantics in film

Using film grammar as the underpinning, we study the extraction of structures in video based on color using a wide configuration of clustering methods combined with existing and new similarity measures. We study the visualisation of these structures, which we call Scene-Cluster Temporal Charts and show how it can bring out the interweaving of different themes and settings in a film. We also extract color events that filmmakers use to draw/force a viewer's attention to a shot/scene. This is done by first extracting a set of colors used rarely in film, and then building a probabilistic model for color event detection. We demonstrate with experimental results from ten movies that our algorithms are effective in the extraction of both scene-cluster temporal charts and color events.

Neighborhood coherence and edge based approaches to film scene extraction

In order to enable high-level semantics-based video 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 film production to determine when a scene change occurs in film. We examine different rules and conventions followed as part of Film Grammar to guide and shape our algorithmic solution for determining a scene boundary. Two different techniques are proposed as new solutions in this paper. Our experimental results on 10 full-length movies show that our technique based on shot sequence coherence performs well and reasonably better than the color edges-based approach.