Journal Paper

Today’s world is characterized by the increasing availability of audiovisual content, created in many application domains and, thus, with rather different semantic characteristics. Audiovisual content is easily acquired, produced, processed, coded, stored and distributed, progressively making more important the ability for users to selectively consume the large amounts of content available. Automatic audiovisual
summarization is a technology playing a major role towards facilitating the user’s effective consumption of large amounts of audiovisual data in a reduced amount of time as time is getting more and more precious and scarce. This paper proposes an automatic summarization system for generic audiovisual content based on MPEG-7 compliant summary descriptions. To evaluate the quality of the created summaries, a user evaluation methodology was designed, and applied with promising results, showing that the developed application is able to summarize with success generic audiovisual
content, especially high action content. The main novelty of this paper is related to the usage of the MPEG-7 summarization tools in combination with an arousal-based audiovisual summarization model, and to the novel user evaluation methodology and study.