This paper describes an approach for automatically detecting action sequences in movies. We examine the filmmaking conventions that are inherent in action sequences and use these as a basis for our analysis. A system of low- mid- and highlevel features is presented that combines pure digital video analysis at the low- and mid-levels, with high-level filmmaking knowledge. A state machine is used to combine these features and detect the action sequences. The overall system is designed so that the analysis can be used to detect different types of scenes, but in this paper we focus on action sequence detection. 1

Abstract. The proliferation of CCTV surveillance systems creates a problem of how to effectively navigate and search the resulting video archive, in a variety of security scenarios. We are concerned here with a situation where a searcher must locate all occurrences of a given person or object within a specified timeframe and with constraints on which camera(s) footage is valid to search. Conventional approaches based on browsing time/camera based combinations are inadequate. We advocate using automatically detected video objects as a basis for search, linking and browsing. In this paper we present a system under development based on users interacting with detected video objects. We outline the suite of technologies needed to achieve such a system and for each we describe where we are in terms of realizing those technologies. We also present a system interface to this system, designed with user needs and user tasks in mind. 1.

This paper proposes a system to automatically locate and extract songs from digitized movies. We focus on the genre of Bollywood movies. A song grammar particularly applicable to this genre is proposed and used subsequently to construct a probabilistic timed automaton to differentiate songs. The proposed system has been implemented and test results indicate both high precision and recall. Songs being a major driver in the success of Bollywood movies, a potentially significant application of the proposed system lies in automatically mining the vast Bollywood movie archives.