Browsing video collections using hypervideo summaries derived from hierarchical clustering

摘要

The invention provides for quickly browsing through a large set of video clips to locate video clips of interest. In an embodiment of the present invention, hierarchical clustering of the video clips can be undertaken enabling the user to successively identify the subgroup of video clips of interest. This approach generates a video summary for the contents of each cluster by selecting representative video clips from individual videos and lower level clusters within the cluster. Links are added between the more general, higher-level clusters and the elements they contain. Thus, starting at the top of the set of videos being browsed or returned by the search engine and continuing at each subsequent cluster level, the user is presented with video summaries for the relevant parts of videos and those of next lower-level clusters. The user can then follow the navigational link to the desired video or lower-level cluster.