Summary description schemes for efficient video navigation and browsing

The Summary Description Scheme (DS) in MPEG-7 aims at providing a summary of an audio-visual program that offers the effective mechanism for efficient access to the program by abstracting the contents. In this paper, we present, in details, the Summary DS proposed to MPEG-7 that allows for efficient navigation and browsing to the contents of interest as well as overview of the overall content in an incorporated way. This efficiency is achieved by a unified description framework that combines static summary based on key frames and key sounds with dynamic summary based on a series of highlights. The proposed DS also allows efficient description for the event-based summarization by specifying summary criteria. In this paper, we also show the usefulness of the Summary DS in real applications largely based on the results of the Validation and Core Experiments we performed in MPEG-7 activities. We also describe a methodology for the automated generation of a dynamic summary.