A METHOD FOR SELECTING FRAMES FROM VIDEO SEQUENCES BASED ON INCREMENTAL IMPROVEMENT

The present application is directed to new methods for automatically and effectively combining multiple metrics to select interesting, or key, frames from a video sequence. In one aspect, the methods include selecting a reference frame from a video sequence and iteratively computing the improvement or gain in the combined metrics for candidate frames with respect to that reference frame. In another aspect, a master list of reference key frames is determined, quality metrics are calculated for each of a plurality of candidate frames associated with each reference key frame, and each reference key frame in the master list is replaced with a candidate frame that yields the greatest aggregate quality improvement over that reference key frame.