Exploiting Script-Subtitles Alignment to Scene Boundary Dectection in Movie

A movie, a typical multimedia data, includes several textual information such as subtitles and annotation texts as well as audio-visual information. In general, a story of a movie is progressed by dialogues of characters and the dialogues are produced based on a pre-written script that contains detailed descriptions of all the information related to the movie. The script consists of scene headings, character names, dialogues, actions, and so on. Rich information related to the movie can be extracted easily and accurately from each component of the script. However, since the script does not contain time information, additional processes are required to synchronize the script with the movie. The subtitle is usually made from the script´s dialogue and has time information to display text on screen when the characters speak. Therefore, synchronization between the script and the movie can be accomplished through an alignment process between the script´s dialogue and its´ subtitle. In this paper, we propose a unique method of scene boundary detection exploited script subtitles alignment. By synchronizing the script to movie, we identify scene boundaries with semantic level. In addition, we build a thesaurus to enhance alignment performance. Experimental results with real movies show that the proposed method can successfully, not only align scripts with those subtitles, but also detect scene boundaries.