23. The computer program product of claim 22 , wherein: the computer program product further comprises computer usable program code to: detect and track faces of characters to generate the face sets; normalize the faces of the face sets; extract local scale invariant features from the face sets by using an active shape model-based (ASM-based) face alignment algorithm to detect facial landmarks; and apply scale invariant feature transforms to the facial landmarks to obtain the local scale invariant features; the computer usable program code for detecting shots to detectshot boundary and scene segmentation; the computer usable program code for identifying images comprises computer usable program code to detect shots of the video; the computer usable program code for partitioning comprises computer usable program code to partition the plurality of faces of characters into sets of faces by merging face sets from separate shots of a character into a single face set by means of a normalized cut process, the normalized cut process using a local neighborhood distance to determine a distance between representations of two faces, wherein: the local neighborhood distance between a face x im εS i and a face x jn εS j , wherein S i and S j comprise face sets, is defined as: d ⁡ ( x im , x jn ) = 1 k 2 ⁢ ∑ x ip ∈ ⁢ N ⁡ ( x im ) , x jq ∈ ⁢ N ⁡ ( x jn ) ⁢ ⁢  x ip - x jq  wherein N(x im ) is a set of k nearest-neighbors of x im in S i for some fixed integer k, N(x jm ) is a set of k nearest-neighbors of x im in S j for the fixed integer k, and ∥·∥ denotes L 2 distance between two faces; and the computer usable program code for partitioning comprises computer usable program code to determine the cast of characters for the video, a frequency of appearance of the characters of the cast of characters, a duration of appearance of the characters of the cast of characters, and scenes containing appearances of the characters of the cast of characters; and the computer program product further comprises computer usable program code to rank the characters of the cast of characters by importance factor (IF), wherein IF is determined by the formula: 
 IF( C i )= w t A t ( C i )+ w f A f ( C i )+ w p A p ( C i ), wherein C i is a character of the cast of characters, A t is an Appearance Time score of C i , A f is an Appearance Frequency score of C i , A p is a page rank score of C i , and the w's represent weights wherein the weights sum to 1.0; and the page rank value A p of a character C i is defined recursively as follows: 1. Initially, A p =1 for each character of the cast of characters, 2. At each further iteration, A p ⁡ ( C i ) = ( 1 - d ) + d ⁢ ∑ j ≠ i ⁢ ⁢ A p ⁡ ( C j ) / L ⁡ ( C j ) , wherein L(C j )=the number of characters appearing jointly with C i , d is a dampening factor, and A p (C j ) is a page rank score of a character C j of the previous iteration, wherein C j jointly appears with C i in a particular scene of the video.
22. The computer program product of claim 21 , wherein: the plurality of faces of the characters of the video comprises a plurality of face sets, wherein: a face set comprises a set of faces of a single character in a shot; a shot comprises a set of video frames captured by a single camera in a consecutive recording session; the computer usable program code for extracting comprises computer usable program code to detect shots of the video; and the computer usable program code for partitioning comprises computer usable program code to merge face sets from separate shots of a character of the characters of the video into a single face set of the character.