Fast tracking of near-duplicate keyframes in broadcast domain with transitivity propagation

The identification of near-duplicate keyframe (NDK) pairs is a useful task for a variety of applications such as news story threading and content-based video search. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the discovery and tracking of NDK pairs and threads in the broadcast domain. The detection of NDKs in a large data set is a challenging task due to the fact that when the data set increases linearly, the computational cost increases in a quadratic speed, and so does the number of false alarms. This paper explores the symmetric and transitive nature of near-duplicate for the effective detection and fast tracking of NDK pairs based upon the matching of local keypoints in frames. In the detection phase, we propose a robust measure, namely pattern entropy (PE), to measure the coherency of symmetric keypoint matching across the space of two keyframes. This measure is shown to be effective in discovering the NDK identity of a frame. In the tracking phase, the NDK pairs and threads are rapidly propagated and linked with sitivity without the need of detection. This step ends up a significant boost in speed efficiency. We evaluate proposed approach against a month of the 2004 broadcast videos. The experimental results indicate our approach outperforms other techniques in terms of recall and precision with a large margin. In addition, by considering the transitivity and the underlying distribution of NDK pairs along time span, a speed up of 3 to 5 times is achieved when keeping the performance close enough to the optimal one obtained by exhaustive evaluation. Copyright 2006 ACM.