Robust Face-Name Graph Matching for Movie Character Identification

Automatic face identification of characters in movies has drawn significant research interests and led to many interesting applications. It is a challenging problem due to the huge variation in the appearance of each character. Although existing methods demonstrate promising results in clean environment, the performances are limited in complex movie scenes due to the noises generated during the face tracking and face clustering process. In this paper we present two schemes of global face-name matching based framework for robust character identification. The contributions of this work include the following. 1) A noise insensitive character relationship representation is incorporated. 2) We introduce an edit operation based graph matching algorithm. 3) Complex character changes are handled by simultaneously graph partition and graph matching. 4) Beyond existing character identification approaches, we further perform an in-depth sensitivity analysis by introducing two types of simulated noises. The proposed schemes demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on movie character identification in various genres of movies.