METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DETECTING SCENE CHANGES IN A DIGITAL VIDEO STREAM

The present invention relates to a device which monitors a digitized video data stream and detects when scene changes occur in the video stream. The present invention detects scene changes by comparing from frame-to-frame each of the pixel colors within the frame. When a high degree of change in pixel color from one frame to the next is detected, this is identified as a scene change. The system of the present invention does not obtain the digitized video data stream by polling a hardware analog-to-digital converter. In order to ensure that the present invention is compatible with any input video source, the present invention does not request data directly from the hardware video digitizing card. Instead, the input video may be displayed upon a computer monitor in any manner, such as by the operating system of the computer. Because the computer must keep track of what is being displayed on the computer monitor, the video data used in the present invention may be downloaded from the operating system by identifying which portion of the screen contains the video data of interest.