Multimedia Summarization in Law Courts: A Clustering-Based Environment for Browsing and Consulting Judicial Folders

Digital videos represent a fundamental informative source of those events that occur during a penal proceedings, which thanks to the technologies available nowadays, can be stored, organized and retrieved in short time and with low cost. However, considering the dimension that a video source can assume during a trial recording, several requirements have been pointed out by judicial actors: fast navigation of the stream, efficient access to data inside and effective representation of relevant contents. One of the possible solutions to these requirements is represented by multimedia summarization aimed at deriving a synthetic representation of audio/video contents, characterized by a limited loss of meaningful information. In this paper a multimedia summarization environment is proposed for defining a storyboard for proceedings celebrated into courtrooms. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.