Modified phase-correlation based robust hard-cut detection with application to archive film

Abstract

This paper targets hard-cut detection for archive film, i.e., mainly black-and-white videos from the beginning of the last century, which is a particularly difficult task due to heavy visual degradations encountered in the sequences. A robust hard-cut detection system based on modified phase correlation is presented. Phase-correlation-based hard-cut detection is carried out using spatially sub-sampled video frames, and a candidate hard-cut is indicated in the case of low correlation. A double thresholding approach consisting of a global threshold used in conjunction with an adaptive local threshold is used to detect candidate hard-cuts. For uniformly colored video frames the phase correlation is extremely sensitive to noise and visual defects. Mean and variance based simple heuristic false removal at uniformly colored video frames is used at the final stage to prevent false detections in such cases. The paper provides a through theoretical analysis to show the usefulness of spatial sub-sampling. Furthermore through experimental results are presented for visual defects encountered in archive film material, to present the effectiveness of the proposed approach.