Abstract: A method is provided that creates a lecture video capsule containing highlights of an original instructional video based on visual quality and content. The method includes segmenting and recognizing activities in the instructional video using a hidden Markov model (HMM). The activities are classified into three categories: talking head, writing hand and slideshow. The talking head frames are classified as non-content frames, while the writing hand and slideshows are classified as content frames. A non-reference based objective quality assessment of the non-content frames may be performed to detect high quality frames. Statistical parameters of an intensity histogram and a horizontal projection profile (HPP) of the content frames may be used to derive an objective quality measure of the content frames that is used to extract high quality content frames. The selected high quality non-content and content frames form a video clip or capsule, which is a temporally compressed representation of the video.