Video word balloon authoring system

With the recent advancements in film and video industry, translation of the script has become increasingly important. Although a dubbing method was often used in the past, the translated subtitles are taking advantages of the actor's voice. However, subtitles usually appear at a fixed position, for example, at the bottom or the right side of the screen. For this reason, viewers can miss the flow of visual contents, and feel some disturbing factors to own attention. In this work, a new video subtitle systsem that uses word balloons is presented. Word balloons are currently used only for still images such as comics, and automatic word-balloon system for images are presented [Chun et al. 2006]. Therefore it is required to define a system for video word-balloons which can preserve contents of video, and convey words of characters efficiently. Our goal is to superimpose word-balloons including script over a video rather than general captions. To do this, where to locate word-balloons in the screen is solved. The most important thing is to determine the optimized position of word-balloons. Also the size, the horizontal and vertical proportions, and motion of word-balloons should be determined reasonably. An automatic face-script mapping system, which empolys machine learning of faces and voices, has been developed to minimize user interactions.