Content based video copy detection using motion vectors

In this thesis, we propose a motion vector based Video Content Based Copy Detection (VCBCD) method. Detecting the videos violating the copyright of the owner comes into question by growing broadcasting of digital video on different media. Unlike watermarking methods in VCBCD methods, the video itself is considered as a signature of the video and representative feature parameters are extracted from a given video and compared with the feature parameters of a test video. Motion vectors of image frames are one of the signatures of a given video. We first investigate how well the motion vectors describe the video. We use Mean value of Magnitudes of Motion Vectors (MMMV) and Mean value of Phases of Motion Vectors (MPMV) of macro blocks, which are the main building blocks of MPEG-type video coding methods. We show that MMMV and MPMV plots may not represent videos uniquely with little motion content because the average of motion vectors in a given frame approaches zero. To overcome this problem we calculate the MMMV and MPMV graphs in a lower frame rate than the actual frame rate of the video. In this way, the motion vectors may become larger and as a result robust signature plots are obtained. Another approach is to use the Histogram of Motion Vectors (HOMV) that includes both MMMV and MPMV information. We test and compare MMMV, MPMV and HOMV methods using test videos including copies and the original movies.