Fast Segmentation of H.264/AVC Bitstreams for On-Demand Video Summarization

Video summarization methods need fast segmentation of a video into smaller units as a first step, especially if used in an on-demand fashion. We propose an efficient segmentation algorithm for H.264/AVC bitstreams that is able to segment a video in appr. 10% of the time required to decode the video. This is possible because our approach uses features available after entropy-decoding (which is the very first stage of the decoding process) only. More precisely, we use a combination of two features, especially appropriate to H.264/AVC, with different characteristics in order to decide if a new segment starts or not: (1) L1-Distance based partition histograms and (2) ratio of intra-coded macroblocks on a per-frame basis. Our results show that this approach performs well and works for several different encoders used in practice today.