Efficient Automatic Text Location Method and Content-Based Indexing and Structuring of Video Database

An efficient automatic text detection and location method for video documents is proposed and its application for the content-based retrieval of video is presented and discussed. Target frames are selected at fixed time intervals from shots detected by a scene-change detection method. For each selected frame, segmentation by color clustering is performed around color peaks using a color histogram. For each color plane, text-lines are detected using heuristics, and the temporal and spatial position and the text-image of each text-line are stored in a database. Experimental results for text detection in video images and the performance of the method are reported for various video documents. A user interface for text-image based browsing is designed for direct content-based access to video documents, and other applications are discussed.