A Fast and Effective Text Tracking in Compressed Video

The starting and ending (S & E) frames of each text that embeds in a scene or is graphically added to video, provide not only important clues for highlight events detection in semantic-based video analysis, indexing and retrieval but also hint for decoding the videos structure and classification. In this paper, a fast text tracking method of determining S & E frames is proposed, which consists of two modules: text matching, where a mean absolute difference (MAD) based line against line matching (LALM) criterion is proposed to determine whether the detected texts in two frames are similar or not; and S & E frames determination, where an MAD based line matching algorithm is introduced in the direct current (DC) domain to determine the accurate positions of the S & E frame. Experiments conducted with a variety of video sources show that the proposed text tracking method is fast and robust.