Does anyone know of an algorithm that I could use to find an "interesting" representative thumbnail for a video?
I have say 30 bitmaps and I would like to choose the most representative one as the video thumbnail.
The obvious first step would be eliminate all black frames. Then perhaps look for the "distance" between the various frames and choose something that is close to the avg.
Any ideas here or published papers that could help out?
It may also be beneficial to favor frames that are aesthetically pleasing. That is, look for common attributes of photography-- aspect ratio, contrast, balance, etc.
It would be hard to find a representative shot if you don't know what you're looking for. But with some heuristics and my suggestion, at least you could come up with something good looking.
I worked on a project recently where we did some video processing, and we used OpenCV to do the heavy lifting as far as video processing was concerned. We had to extract frames, calculate differences, extract faces, etc. OpenCV has some built-in algorithms that will calculate differences between frames. It works with a variety of video and image formats.