CARA: Character Appearance Retrieval and Analysis for TV Programs

This paper describes a character retrieval system for TV programs and a set of novel algorithms for detecting and recognizing faces for the system. Our character retrieval system consists of two main components: Face Register and Face Recognizer. The Face Register detects faces in video frames and then guides users to register the detected faces of interest into the database. The Face Recognizer displays the appearance interval of each character on the timeline interface and the list of scenes with the names of characters that appear on each scene. These two components also provide a function to modify incorrect results. which is helpful to provide accurate character retrieval services. In the proposed face detection and recognition algorithms. we reduce the computation time without sacrificing the recognition accuracy by using the DCT/LDA method for face feature extraction. We also develop the character retrieval system in the form of plug-in. By plugging in our system to a cataloguing system. the metadata about the characters in a video can be automatically generated. Through this system, we can easily realize sophisticated on-demand video services which provide the search of scenes of a specific TV star.