Audio-visual content-based violent scene characterization.pdf

I C I P - 9 8 AUDIO-VISUAL CONTENT-BASED VIOLENT SCENE CHARACTERIZATION Jeho Nam, Masoud Alghoniemy and Ahmed H. Tewk Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA e-mail: fjnam,masoud,tewkg@ ABSTRACT We present a novel technique to characterize and index violent scenes in general TV drama and movies. Our goal is to identify violent signatures and localize vio- lent events within a movie to support \high-level video indexing. In particular, we exploit multiple \audio- visual signatures to create a perceptual relation for conceptually meaningful violent scene identication. Po- tential applications are automatic blocking of violence in movies watched by children, hiding violence using data hiding or information ltering and genre classi- cation of digital video database. 1. INTRODUCTION Currently, almost all reported video indexing schemes rely on low-level visual feature analysis. Regardless of conceptual meanings, those schemes allow searching for image/video containing visual characteristics similar to those dened by a user, such as color, texture, motion, sketch and shape of video objects [1]. These approaches have achieved some success. However, they are limited to a narrow denition of \content-based searching and matching. Higher level features must be used to ad- dress a general users desire to search for semantically meaningful information. For instance, one may desire to fast search and access time-localized specic events of interest in a general lm such as \gunghts scene in gangster or Western lms or \kissing scenes in ro- mantic movies. Unlike the domain-specic applica- tions, these kinds of events can be commonly found in almost all lm genres. These semantic contents should be suitably described by composition of multiple low- level audio-visual features to link \high-level concepts [2]. In this paper, we introduce a novel high-level index- ing scheme to characterize and abstract violent c