• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.10-19
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• 2003

Caption information in news videos can be useful for video indexing and retrieval since it usually suggests or implies the contents of the video very well. In this paper, a new algorithm for extracting and recognizing characters from news video is proposed, without a priori knowledge such as font type, color, size of character. In the process of text region extraction, in order to improve the recognition rate for videos with complex background at low resolution, continuous frames with identical text regions are automatically detected to compose an average frame. The image of the averaged frame is projected to horizontal and vertical direction, and we apply region filling to remove backgrounds to produce the character. Then, K-means color clustering is applied to remove remaining backgrounds to produce the final text image. In the process of character recognition, simple features such as white run and zero-one transition from the center, are extracted from unknown characters. These feature are compared with the pre-composed character feature set to recognize the characters. Experimental results tested on various news videos show that the proposed method is superior in terms of caption extraction ability and character recognition rate.