Automatic text segmentation and text recognition for video indexing

Efficient indexing and retrieval of digital video is an important function of video databases. One powerful index for retrieval is the text appearing in them. It enables content-based browsing. We present our methods for automatic seg-mentation of text in digital videos. The output is directly passed to a standard OCR software package in order to translate the segmented text into ASCII. The algorithms we propose make use of typical characteristics of text in videos in order to enable and enhance segmentation performance. Especially the inter-frame dependencies of the characters provide new possibilities for their refinement. Then, a straightforward indexing and retrieval scheme is intro-duced. It is used in the experiments to demonstrate that the proposed text segmentation algorithms together with exist-ing text recognition algorithms are suitable for indexing and retrieval of relevant video sequences in and from a video database. Our experimental results are very encouraging and suggest that these algorithms can be used in video retrieval applications as well as to recognize higher seman-tics in videos

Beyond English text: Multilingual and multimedia information retrieval.

Non

The TREC2001 video track: information retrieval on digital video information

The development of techniques to support content-based access to archives of digital video information has recently started to receive much attention from the research community. During 2001, the annual TREC activity, which has been benchmarking the performance of information retrieval techniques on a range of media for 10 years, included a ”track“ or activity which allowed investigation into approaches to support searching through a video library. This paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive picture of the different approaches taken by the TREC2001 video track participants but instead we give an overview of the TREC video search task and a thumbnail sketch of the approaches taken by different groups. The reason for writing this paper is to highlight the message from the TREC video track that there are now a variety of approaches available for searching and browsing through digital video archives, that these approaches do work, are scalable to larger archives and can yield useful retrieval performance for users. This has important implications in making digital libraries of video information attainable