Mark Williams

Content-based analysis of video using audio and visual features has previously been used for the automatic tasks of scene/shot segmentation and video summarization. We present new work that extends this research to automatically extract and compare the narrative structure of feature films, discover patterns in the relationship of music, sound, and image, and classify films according to their director using audio, visual, and joint audio-visual features.

From exposing Jackson Pollock forgeries to clarifying the sections of the Federalist Papers written by Alexander Hamilton, computational analysis and machine learning have proven to be powerful tools in the study of authorship. Film scholar Warren Buckland used the statistical analysis of shot lengths and shot types to make a persuasive claim that Tobe Hooper, and not Steven Spielberg as rumored, directed Poltergeist (1982). However, Buckland and other scholars using Cinemetrics have had to manually enter data for these elements.