In a technique for video segmentation, classification and summarization
based on the singular value decomposition, frames of the input video
sequence are represented by vectors composed of concatenated histograms
descriptive of the spatial distributions of colors within the video
frames. The singular value decomposition maps these vectors into a
refined feature space. In the refined feature space produced by the
singular value decomposition, the invention uses a metric to measure the
amount of information contained in each video shot of the input video
sequence. The most static video shot is defined as an information unit,
and the content value computed from this shot is used as a threshold to
cluster the remaining frames. The clustered frames are displayed using a
set of static keyframes or a summary video sequence. The video
segmentation technique relies on the distance between the frames in the
refined feature space to calculate the similarity between frames in the
input video sequence. The input video sequence is segmented based on the
values of the calculated similarities. Finally, average video attribute
values in each segment are used in classifying the segments.