A Framework for Measuring Video Similarity and Its Application to Video Query by Example

The usefulness of a video database relies on whether the video of interest can be easily located. To allow exploring, browsing, and retrieving videos according to their visual content, efficient techniques for evaluating the visual similarity between different video clips are necessary. We present a framework for measuring video similarity across different resolutions – both spatial and temporal. In particular, the video clips to be compared can be properly aligned through the use of suitable weighting functions and alignment constraints. Dynamic programming techniques are employed to obtain the video similarity measure with a reasonable computational cost. An application to searching MPEG compressed video by example is presented to demonstrate the potential use of the proposed video similarity measure.