Method and apparatus for filtering visual documents

A method and apparatus for producing an abstract or condensed version of a visual document is presented. The frames comprising the visual document are first sampled to reduce the number of frames required for processing. The frames are then subjected to a structural decomposition process that reduces all information in each frame to a set of values. These values are in turn normalized and further combined to produce only one information content value per frame. The information content values of these frames are then compared to a selected distribution cutoff point. This effectively selects those values at the tails of a normal distribution, thus filtering key frames from their surrounding frames. The value for each frame is then compared with the value from the previous frame, and the respective frame is finally stored only if the values are significantly different. The method filters or compresses a visual document with a reduction in digital storage on the ratio of up to 700 to 1 or more, depending on the content of the visual document being filtered.