Advances in Visual Information Management

Video segmentation is the most fundamental process for appropriate index­ ing and retrieval of video intervals. In general, video streams are composed 1 of shots delimited by physical shot boundaries. Substantial work has been done on how to detect such shot boundaries automatically (Arman et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1993) (Zhang et aI. , 1995) (Kobla et aI. , 1997). Through the inte­ gration of technologies such as image processing, speech/character recognition and natural language understan