• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.81-96
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• 2013

Video information retrieval has become a very important issue because of the explosive increase in video data from Web content development. Meanwhile, content-based video analysis using visual features has been the main source for video information retrieval and browsing. Content in video can be represented with content-based analysis techniques, which can extract various features from audio-visual data such as frames, shots, colors, texture, or shape. Moreover, similarity between videos can be measured through content-based analysis. However, a movie that is one of typical types of video data is organized by story as well as audio-visual data. This causes a semantic gap between significant information recognized by people and information resulting from content-based analysis, when content-based video analysis using only audio-visual data of low level is applied to information retrieval of movie. The reason for this semantic gap is that the story line for a movie is high level information, with relationships in the content that changes as the movie progresses. Information retrieval related to the story line of a movie cannot be executed by only content-based analysis techniques. A formal model is needed, which can determine relationships among movie contents, or track meaning changes, in order to accurately retrieve the story information. Recently, story-based video analysis techniques have emerged using a social network concept for story information retrieval. These approaches represent a story by using the relationships between characters in a movie, but these approaches have problems. First, they do not express dynamic changes in relationships between characters according to story development. Second, they miss profound information, such as emotions indicating the identities and psychological states of the characters. Emotion is essential to understanding a character's motivation, conflict, and resolution. Third, they do not take account of events and background that contribute to the story. As a result, this paper reviews the importance and weaknesses of previous video analysis methods ranging from content-based approaches to story analysis based on social network. Also, we suggest necessary elements, such as character, background, and events, based on narrative structures introduced in the literature. We extract characters' emotional words from the script of the movie Pretty Woman by using the hierarchical attribute of WordNet, which is an extensive English thesaurus. WordNet offers relationships between words (e.g., synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, antonyms). We present a method to visualize the emotional pattern of a character over time. Second, a character's inner nature must be predetermined in order to model a character arc that can depict the character's growth and development. To this end, we analyze the amount of the character's dialogue in the script and track the character's inner nature using social network concepts, such as in-degree (incoming links) and out-degree (outgoing links). Additionally, we propose a method that can track a character's inner nature by tracing indices such as degree, in-degree, and out-degree of the character network in a movie through its progression. Finally, the spatial background where characters meet and where events take place is an important element in the story. We take advantage of the movie script to extracting significant spatial background and suggest a scene map describing spatial arrangements and distances in the movie. Important places where main characters first meet or where they stay during long periods of time can be extracted through this scene map. In view of the aforementioned three elements (character, event, background), we extract a variety of information related to the story and evaluate the performance of the proposed method. We can track story information extracted over time and detect a change in the character's emotion or inner nature, spatial movement, and conflicts and resolutions in the story.