Automated Video Face Labelling for Films and TV Material

The objective of this work is automatic labelling of characters in TV video and movies, given weak supervisory information provided by an aligned transcript. We make five contributions: (i) a new strategy for obtaining stronger supervisory information from aligned transcripts; (ii) an explicit model for classifying background characters, based on their face-tracks; (iii) employing new ConvNet based face features, and (iv) a novel approach for labelling all face tracks jointly using linear programming. Each of these contributions delivers a boost in performance, and we demonstrate this on standard benchmarks using tracks provided by authors of prior work. As a fifth contribution, we also investigate the generalisation and strength of the features and classifiers by applying them “in the raw” on new video material where no supervisory information is used. In particular, to provide high quality tracks on those material, we propose efficient track classifiers to remove false positive tracks by the face tracker. Overall we achieve a dramatic improvement over the state of the art on both TV series and film datasets, and almost saturate performance on some benchmarks.