A method for original image recovery for caption areas in video

It is sometimes necessary to remove the captions from video images already broadcast and recover the original images. Traditional research on image restoration has focused on restoring blurred images to sharp images using frequency filtering. This paper proposes a method for extracting caption regions and a method for automatically recovering original. The caption region detection method extracts caption candidate regions using TF (topographic feature) of characters, and verifies candidate regions to determine the final caption regions. From the result of caption region detection, we know the start and end frames of captions in video and the character areas in the caption regions. For original image recovery, we use information such as the start and end frames of the detected caption, camera operation, scene change and motion vector of extracted characters in caption regions. The direction for the recovery is decided using information on the scene change, the start and end frame for captions. According to the direction, we recover the original image using information of camera operation and Block Matching Algorithm (BMA) for character components in extracted caption region. Experimental results show that the case of stationary images having little motions is well recovered. We see that the case of images having motion in complex background is also recovered.