An integrated approach to summarization and adaptation using H.264/MPEG-4 SVC

The huge amount of multimedia content and the variety of terminals and networks make video summarization and video adaptation two key technologies to provide effective access and browsing. With scalable video coding, the adaptation of video to heterogeneous terminals and networks can be efficiently achieved using together a layered coding hierarchy and bitstream extraction. On the other hand, many video summarization techniques can be seen as a special case of structural adaptation. This paper describes how some of them can be modified and included in the adaptation framework of the scalable extension of H.264/AVC. The advantage of this approach is that summarization and adaptation are integrated into the same efficient framework. The utility of this approach is demonstrated with experimental results for the generation of storyboards and video skims, showing that the proposed framework can generate the adapted bitstream of the summary faster than a conventional transcoding approach.