Extraction of film takes for cinematic analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the 'reverse editing' problem in movie analysis, i.e., the extraction of film takes, original camera shots that a film editor extracts and arranges to produce a finished scene. The ability to disassemble final scenes and shots into takes is essential for nonlinear browsing, content annotation and the extraction of higher order cinematic constructs from film. A two-part framework for take extraction is proposed. The first part focuses on the filtering out action-driven scenes for which take extraction is not useful. The second part focuses on extracting film takes using agglomerative hierarchical clustering methods along with different similarity metrics and group distances and demonstrates our findings with 10 movies. © 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.