High-Level Features for Movie Style Understanding

Marc Christie

Abstract: Automatically analysing stylistic features in movies is a challenging task, as it requires an in-depth knowledge of cinematography. In the literature, only a handful of methods explore stylistic feature extraction, and they typically focus on limited low-level image and shot features (colour histograms, average shot lengths or shot types, amount of camera motion). These, however, only capture a subset of the stylistic features which help to characterise a movie (e.g. black and white vs. coloured, or film editing). To this end, in this work, we systematically explore seven high-level features for movie style analysis: character segmentation, pose estimation, depth maps, focus maps, frame layering, camera motion type and camera pose. Our findings show that low-level features remain insufficient for movie style analysis, while high-level features seem promising.