Character-based movie summarization

Abstract

A decent movie summary is helpful for movie producer to promote the movie as well as audience to capture the theme of the movie before watching the whole movie. Most exiting automatic movie summarization approaches heavily rely on video content only, which may not deliver ideal result due to the semantic gap between computer calculated low-level features and human used high-level understanding. In this paper, we incorporate script into movie analysis and propose a novel character-based movie summarization approach, which is validated by modern film theory that what actually catches audiences' attention is the character [6]. We first segment scenes in the movie by analysis and alignment of script and movie. Then we conduct substory discovery and content attention analysis based on the scene analysis and character interaction features. Given obtained movie structure and content attention value, we calculate movie attraction scores at both shot and scene levels and adopt this as criterion to generate movie summary. The promising experimental results demonstrate that character analysis is effective for movie summarization and movie content understanding.

Story-based Video Retrieval in TV series using Plot Synopses

“…This is also reflected in recent video summarization techniques [19] which are turning towards identifying characters prior to summarization.…”

Methods for Character Identification in Movies: A Review

“…We modify the traditional global matching framework by using ordinal graphs for robust representation and introducing an ECGM-based graph matching method. For face and name graph construction, the character co-occurrence in rank ordinal level [10], which scores the strength of the relationships in a rank order from the weakest to strongest. Rank order data carry no numerical meaning and thus are less sensitive to the noises.…”

Movie Script Summarization as Graph-based Scene Extraction

“…Characters are typically identified using face recognition techniques and scene boundaries are presumed unknown and are automatically detected. A notable exception are Sang and Xu (2010) who generate video summaries for movies, while taking into account character interaction features which they estimate from the corresponding screenplay.…”