Match Cutting: Finding Cuts With Smooth Visual Transitions

Boris Chen, Amir Ziai, Rebecca S. Tucker, Yuchen Xie; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 2115-2125

A match cut is a transition between a pair of shots that uses similar framing, composition, or action to fluidly bring the viewer from one scene to the next. Match cuts are frequently used in film, television, and advertising. However, finding shots that work together is a highly manual and time-consuming process that can take days. We propose a modular and flexible system to efficiently find high-quality match cut candidates starting from millions of shot pairs. We annotate and release a dataset of approximately 20,000 labeled pairs that we use to evaluate our system, using both classification and metric learning approaches that leverage a variety of image, video, audio, and audio-visual feature extractors. In addition, we release code and embeddings for reproducing our experiments at github.com/netflix/matchcut.