Estimating cinematographic scene depth in movie shots

Abstract

In film-making, the distance from the camera to the subject greatly affects the narrative power of a shot. By the alternate use of Long shots, Medium and Close-ups the director is able to provide emphasis on key passages of the filmed scene. In this work we investigate four different inherent characteristics of single shots which contain indirect information about scene depth, without the need to recover the 3D structure of the scene as a prior step. Specifically, 2D scene geometric composition, frame colour properties, shot motion distribution and content are considered for classifying shots into three main categories. In the experimental phase, using SVM classifiers, we first test the ability of each single feature in distinguishing shot types; then we combine the whole feature set in order to improve the classification performance.