Hello! My name is... Buffy'' -- Automatic Naming of Characters in TV Video

Abstract

We investigate the problem of automatically labelling appearances of characters in TV or film material. This is tremendously challenging due to the huge variation in imaged appearance of each character and the weakness and ambiguity of available annotation. However, we demonstrate that high precision can be achieved by combining multiple sources of information, both visual and textual. The principal novelties that we introduce are: (i) automatic generation of time stamped character annotation by aligning subtitles and transcripts; (ii) strengthening the supervisory information by identifying when characters are speaking; (iii) using complementary cues of face matching and clothing matching to propose common annotations for face tracks. Results are presented on episodes of the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”.