REIHE INFORMATIK 6/96 Indexing and Retrieval of Digital Video Sequences based on Automatic Text Recognition

Efficient indexing and retrieval of digital video is an important aspect of video databases. One powerful index for retrieval is the text appearing in them. It enables contentbased browsing. We present our methods for automatic segmentation and recognition of text in digital videos. The algorithms we propose make use of typical characteristics of text in videos in order to enable and enhance segmentation and recognition performance. Especially the inter-frame dependencies of the characters provide new possibilities for their refinement. Then, a straightforward indexing and retrieval scheme is introduced. It is used in the experiments to demonstrate that the proposed text segmentation and text recognition algorithms are suitable for indexing and retrieval of relevant video scenes 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 semantics in