We propose a fully automatic method for summarizing and indexing unstructured presentation videos based on text extracted from the projected slides. We use changes of text in the slides as a means to segment the video into semantic shots. Unlike precedent approaches, our method does not depend on availability of the electronic source of the slides, but rather extracts and recognizes the text directly from the video. Once text regions are detected within keyframes, a novel binarization algorithm, Local Adaptive Otsu (LOA), is employed to deal with the low quality of video scene text, before feeding the regions to the open source Tesseract1 OCR engine for recognition. We tested our system on a corpus of 8 presentation videos for a total of 1 hour and 45 minutes, achieving 0.5343 Precision and 0.7446 Recall Character recognition rates, and 0.4947 Precision and 0.6651 Recall Word recognition rates. Besides being used for multimedia documents, topic indexing, and cross referencing, our sys...
Michele Merler, John R. Kender