Action Sequence Detection in Motion Pictures

This paper describes an approach for automatically detecting action sequences in movies. We examine the filmmaking conventions that are inherent in action sequences and use these as a basis for our analysis. A system of lowmidand highlevel features is presented that combines pure digital video analysis at the lowand mid-levels, with high-level filmmaking knowledge. A state machine is used to combine these features and detect the action sequences. The overall system is designed so that the analysis can be used to detect different types of scenes, but in this paper we focus on action sequence detection.