Exploring the Utility of Fast-Forward Surrogates for BBC Rushes

This paper discusses in detail our approaches for producing the video summaries submitted to the TRECVID 2008 BBC rushes summarization task, including the baseline method. Empirical work produced during and after the TRECVID 2007 rushes summarization task gave strong evidence that a simple 50x method (sampling every 50th frame) provides excellent coverage (text inclusion performance). Our submissions for TRECVID 2008 investigated the effects of junk frame removal, including a comprehensible audio track, and emphasizing pans and zooms when backfilling to reclaim the space removed with the noise shots from the original 50x set. Results show that 50x based methods provide excellent coverage as expected. There were limited effects for the other strategies to improve user satisfaction, with the discussion providing some insights for future video summary development and evaluation work.