Video OCR: indexing digital news libraries by recognition of superimposed captions

The automatic extraction and recognition of news captions and annotations can be of great help locating topics of interest in digital news video libraries. To achieve this goal, we present a technique, called Video OCR (Optical Character Reader), which detects, extracts, and reads text areas in digital video data. In this paper, we address problems, describe the method by which Video OCR operates, and suggest applications for its use in digital news archives. To solve two problems of character recognition for videos, low-resolution characters and extremely complex backgrounds, we apply an interpolation filter, multi-frame integration and character extraction filters. Character segmentation is performed by a recognition-based segmentation method, and intermediate character recognition results are used to improve the segmentation. We also include a method for locating text areas using text-like properties and the use of a language-based postprocessing technique to increase word recognition rates. The overall recognition results are satisfactory for use in news indexing. Performing Video OCR on news video and combining its results with other video understanding techniques will improve the overall understanding of the news video content.     

Scene change detection techniques for video database systems

Scene change detection (SCD) is one of several fundamental problems in the design of a video database management system (VDBMS). It is the first step towards the automatic segmentation, annotation, and indexing of video data. SCD is also used in other aspects of VDBMS, e.g., hierarchical representation and efficient browsing of the video data. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy that classifies existing SCD algorithms into three categories: full-video-image-based, compressed-video-based, and model-based algorithms. The capabilities and limitations of the SCD algorithms are discussed in detail. The paper also proposes a set of criteria for measuring and comparing the performance of various SCD algorithms. We conclude by discussing some important research directions.     

Extraction of special effects caption text events from digital video

Abstract. The popularity of digital video is increasing rapidly. To help users navigate libraries of video, algorithms that automatically index video based on content are needed. One approach is to extract text appearing in video, which often reflects a scene's semantic content. This is a difficult problem due to the unconstrained nature of general-purpose video. Text can have arbitrary color, size, and orientation. Backgrounds may be complex and changing. Most work so far has made restrictive assumptions about the nature of text occurring in video. Such work is therefore not directly applicable to unconstrained, general-purpose video. In addition, most work so far has focused only on detecting the spatial extent of text in individual video frames. However, text occurring in video usually persists for several seconds. This constitutes a text event that should be entered only once in the video index. Therefore it is also necessary to determine the temporal extent of text events. This is a non-trivial problem because text may move, rotate, grow, shrink, or otherwise change over time. Such text effects are common in television programs and commercials but so far have received little attention in the literature. This paper discusses detecting, binarizing, and tracking caption text in general-purpose MPEG-1 video. Solutions are proposed for each of these problems and compared with existing work found in the literature. Received: January 29, 2002 / Accepted: September 13, 2002 D. Crandall is now with Eastman Kodak Company, 1700 Dewey Avenue, Rochester, NY 14650-1816, USA; e-mail: david.crandall@kodak.com S. Antani is now with the National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA; e-mail: antani@nlm.nih.gov Correspondence to: David Crandall     

Wavelet-based video indexing and querying

We present several algorithms suitable for analysis of broadcast video. First, we show how wavelet analysis of frames of video can be used to detect transitions between shots in a video stream, thereby dividing the stream into segments. Next we describe how each segment can be inserted into a video database using an indexing scheme that involves a wavelet-based “signature.” Finally, we show that during a subsequent broadcast of a similar or identical video clip, the segment can be found in the database by quickly searching for the relevant signature. The method is robust against noise and typical variations in the video stream, even global changes in brightness that can fool histogram-based techniques. In the paper, we compare experimentally our shot transition mechanism to a color histogram implementation, and also evaluate the effectiveness of our database-searching scheme. Our algorithms are very efficient and run in realtime on a desktop computer. We describe how this technology could be employed to construct a “smart VCR” that was capable of alerting the viewer to the beginning of a specific program or identifying     

Extraction and recognition of artificial text in multimedia documents

Abstract The systems currently available for contentbased image and video retrieval work without semantic knowledge, i. e. they use image processing methods to extract low level features of the data. The similarity obtained by these approaches does not always correspond to the similarity a human user would expect. A way to include more semantic knowledge into the indexing process is to use the text included in the images and video sequences. It is rich in information but easy to use, e. g. by key word based queries. In this paper we present an algorithm to localise artificial text in images and videos using a measure of accumulated gradients and morphological processing. The quality of the localised text is improved by robust multiple frame integration. A new technique for the binarisation of the text boxes based on a criterion maximizing local contrast is proposed. Finally, detection and OCR results for a commercial OCR are presented, justifying the choice of the binarisation technique.An erratum to this article can be found at     

Using string matching to detect video transitions

The detection of shot boundaries in videos captures the structure of the image sequences by the identification of transitional effects. This task is important in the video indexing and retrieval domain. The video slice or visual rhythm is a single two-dimensional image sampling that has been used to detect several types of video events, including transitions. We use the longest common subsequence (LCS) between two strings to transform the video slice into one-dimensional signals obtaining a highly simplified representation of the video content. We also developed a chain of mathematical morphology operations over these signals leading to the detection of the most frequent video transitions, namely, cut, fade, and wipe. The algorithms are tested with success with various genres of videos.     

Pitch-based segmentation and recognition of dot-matrix text

Dot-matrix text recognition is a difficult problem, especially when characters are broken into several disconnected components. We present a dot-matrix text recognition system which uses the fact that dot-matrix fonts are fixed-pitch, in order to overcome the difficulty of the segmentation process. After finding the most likely pitch of the text, a decision is made as to whether the text is written in a fixed-pitch or proportional font. Fixed-pitch text is segmented using a pitch-based segmentation process that can successfully segment both touching and broken characters. We report performance results for the pitch estimation, fixed-pitch decision and segmentation, and recognition processes. Received October 18, 1999 / Revised April 21, 2000     

Techniques used and open challenges to the analysis,indexing and retrieval of digital video

Video in digital format is now commonplace and widespread in both professional use, and in domestic consumer products from camcorders to mobile phones. Video content is growing in volume and while we can capture, compress, store, transmit and display video with great facility, editing videos and manipulating them based on their content is still a non-trivial activity. In this paper, we give a brief review of the state of the art of video analysis, indexing and retrieval and we point to research directions which we think are promising and could make searching and browsing of video archives based on video content, as easy as searching and browsing (text) web pages. We conclude the paper with a list of grand challenges for researchers working in the area.     

图象和视频的检索技术

随着网络技术的发展,多媒体数据将成为网络服务的主要内容,因此对多媒体数据管理问题的研究成为近几年的热点。由于媒体信息表现性质的不同,传统关系数据库的检索方式不再适用于图象和视频,因此,必须采用基于自身内容的检索方式。文章对基于内容的图象和视频检索技术分不同层次进行了全面的总结,内容包括依据基本特征,色彩、纹理、形状、和位置关系的技术,视频的场景分割、关键帧提取技术以及基于声音、文字的检索技术等,并阐述了各种方法的优缺点,现状及发展方向。