• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.279-292
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• 2011

Movie is a representative media that can transmit stories to audiences. Basically, a story is described by characters in the movie. Different from other simple videos, movies deploy narrative structures for explaining various conflicts or collaborations between characters. These narrative structures consist of 3 main acts, which are beginning, middle, and ending. The beginning act includes 1) introduction to main characters and backgrounds, and 2) conflicts implication and clues for incidents. The middle act describes the events developed by both inside and outside factors and the story dramatic tension heighten. Finally, in the end act, the events are developed are resolved, and the topic of story and message of writer are transmitted. When story information is extracted from movie, it is needed to consider that it has different weights by narrative structure. Namely, when some information is extracted, it has a different influence to story deployment depending on where it locates at the beginning, middle and end acts. The beginning act is the part that exposes to audiences for story set-up various information such as setting of characters and depiction of backgrounds. And thus, it is necessary to extract much kind information from the beginning act in order to abstract a movie or retrieve character information. Thereby, this paper proposes a novel method for extracting the beginning boundaries. It is the method that detects a boundary scene between the beginning act and middle using the accumulation graph of characters. The beginning act consists of the scenes that introduce important characters, imply the conflict relationship between them, and suggest clues to resolve troubles. First, a scene that the new important characters don't appear any more should be detected in order to extract a scene completed the introduction of them. The important characters mean the major and minor characters, which can be dealt as important characters since they lead story progression. Extra should be excluded in order to extract a scene completed the introduction of important characters in the accumulation graph of characters. Extra means the characters that appear only several scenes. Second, the inflection point is detected in the accumulation graph of characters. It is the point that the increasing line changes to horizontal line. Namely, when the slope of line keeps zero during long scenes, starting point of this line with zero slope becomes the inflection point. Inflection point will be detected in the accumulation graph of characters without extra. Third, several scenes are considered as additional story progression such as conflicts implication and clues suggestion. Actually, movie story can arrive at a scene located between beginning act and middle when additional several scenes are elapsed after the introduction of important characters. We will decide the ratio of additional scenes for total scenes by experiment in order to detect this scene. The ratio of additional scenes is gained as 7.67% by experiment. It is the story inflection point to change from beginning to middle act when this ratio is added to the inflection point of graph. Our proposed method consists of these three steps. We selected 10 movies for experiment and evaluation. These movies consisted of various genres. By measuring the accuracy of boundary detection experiment, we have shown that the proposed method is more efficient.