Detecting and retrieving texts from electronic marquees in natural scenes

Abstract

This paper proposed a system which is able to detect the electronic marquee in natural scenes and retrieve the full contents displayed by the electronic marquee automatically. First, the system locates the marquee in natural images by analyzing the optical flow fields of the video sequence. Meanwhile, the starting and ending time of scrolling texts can also be obtained. Then, text blocks are retrieved by the integration of temporal information and geometric projections. Finally, text blocks which have the same contents in adjacent frames are associated together. The full contents displayed by the electronic marquee are reconstructed by rearranging these text blocks. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in displaying texts in the electronic marquee regardless of the language or the color of texts.