Robust video shot change detection

We present a novel improvement to existing schemes for abrupt shot change detection. Existing schemes declare a shot change whenever the frame to frame histogram difference (FFD) value is above a particular threshold. In such an approach, a high value for the threshold results in a small number of false alarms and a large number of missed detections while a low value for the threshold decreases the number of missed detections at the expense of increasing the false alarms. We attribute this situation to the fact that the FFD cannot be reliably used as the sole indicator for the presence of a shot change. In the proposed method a two-step shot detection strategy is used which selectively uses a likelihood ratio (computed directly from the frames and not from the histograms) to confirm the presence of a shot change. Such a two-step checking increases the probability of detection without increasing the probability of false alarm. The improvement proposed is simple and computationally cheap. Tests with a wide variety of video sequences prove the efficacy of the proposed approach.