Automated Colorization of Video Subtitles

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Automated Colorization of Video Subtitles"

By

Mr. Xuxiang LIN


Abstract

Subtitling, or captioning, refers to the process of presenting textual 
information about a video scene usually at the bottom of the display. This 
process is heavily employed in movies in order to provide a printed 
translation of the dialogue. It is also commonly used to provide a 
transcription of a program which is useful for the hearing impaired or in 
environments where the audio is intentionally muted. In this paper we 
present the first method to automatically colorize subtitles in a movie. 
Our subtitle colorization process is formulated as a shortest path problem 
that optimizes for all subtitle colors considering both contrast and color 
harmony between the subtitle colors and underlying movie scenes. It also 
prevents sudden color transitions between consecutive subtitles. Our 
results show that colorizing subtitles can simultaneously improve the 
visual appeal and readability of captioned text. We hope that this problem 
will find wide applicability in the movie, TV, and entertainment 
industries.


Date:			Monday, 20 December 2010

Time:			2:30pm – 4:30pm

Venue:			Room 4480
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Pedro Sander (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Huamin Qu (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Chiew-Lan Tai


**** ALL are Welcome ****