Broadcast news parsing using visual cues: a robust face detection approach

Automatic content-based analysis and indexing of broadcast news recordings or digitized news archives is becoming an important tool in the framework of many multimedia interactive services such as news summarization, browsing, retrieval and news-on-demand (NoD) applications. Existing approaches have achieved high performance in such applications but heavily rely on textual cues such as closed caption tokens and teletext transcripts. We present an efficient technique for temporal segmentation and parsing of news recordings based on visual cues that can either be employed as a stand-alone application for non-closed captioned broadcasts or integrated with audio and textual cues of existing systems. The technique involves robust face detection by means of color segmentation, skin color matching and shape processing, and is able to identify typical news instances like anchor persons, reports and outdoor shots