Video Skimming Methods and Systems

A method of generating a skimming preview of a video, the method comprising:

• electronically receiving a reconstruction reference tree comprising video shots categorized within concept categories ordered according to concept importance, wherein video shots within each concept category is ordered according to saliency;
• selecting shots starting from categories of highest importance and shots of highest saliency within the categories of highest importance;
• and
• generating the skimming preview based on the selected shots.

A non-transitory computer readable medium with an executable program stored thereon, wherein the program instructs a microprocessor to perform the following steps:

• analyzing each frame in a video shot from a plurality of video shots, analyzing comprising determining a saliency of each frame of the video shot;
• determining an effective visual saliency based on the determined saliency and based on camera motion of each from of the video shot;
• selecting a key frame of the video shot based on the effective visual saliency of each frame the video shot;
• extracting visual features from the key frame;
• performing shot clustering of the plurality of video shots to determine concept patterns based on the visual features;
• and
• generate a reconstruction reference tree based on the shot clustering, the reconstruction reference tree comprising video shots categorized according to each concept pattern.