Hierarchical video summarization for medical data

To provide users with an overview of medical video content at various levels of abstraction which can be used for more efficient database browsing and access, a hierarchical video summarization strategy has been developed and is presented in this paper. To generate an overview, the key frames of a video are preprocessed to extract special frames (black frames, slides, clip art, sketch drawings) and special regions (faces, skin or blood-red areas). A shot grouping method is then applied to merge the spatially or temporally related shots into groups. The visual features and knowledge from the video shots are integrated to assign the groups into predefined semantic categories. Based on the video groups and their semantic categories, video summaries for different levels are constructed by group merging, hierarchical group clustering and semantic category selection. Based on this strategy, a user can select the layer of the summary to access. The higher the layer, the more concise the video summary; the lower the layer, the greater the detail contained in the summary.