IM(S)2: Interactive movie summarization system

The need of summarization methods and systems has become more and more crucial as the audio-visual material continues its critical growth. This paper presents a novel vision and a novel system for movies summarization. A video summary is an audio-visual document displaying the essential parts of an original document. However, the definition of the term “essential” is user-dependent. The advantage of this work, unlike the others, is the involvement of users in the summarization process. By means of IM(S)2, people generate on the fly customized video summaries responding to their preferences. IM(S)2 is made up of an offline part and an online part. In the offline, we segment the movies into shots and we compute features describing them. In the online part users inform about their preferences by selecting interesting shots. After that, the system will analyze the selected shots to bring out the user’s preferences. Finally the system will generate a summary from the whole movie which will provide more focus on the user’s preferences. To show the efficiency of IM(S)2, it was tested on the database of the European project MUSCLE made up of five movies. We invited 10 users to evaluate the usability of our system by generating for every movie of the database a semi-supervised summary and to judge at the end its quality. Obtained results are encouraging and show the merits of our approach.