Subtitling, or captioning, refers to the process of presenting textual information about a video scene usually at the bottom of the display. This process is heavily employed in movies in order to provide a printed translation of the dialogue. It is also commonly used to provide a transcription of a program which is useful for the hearing impaired or in environments where the audio is intentionally muted. In this thesis we present the first method to automatically colorize subtitles in a movie. Our subtitle colorization process is formulated as a shortest path problem that optimizes for all subtitle colors considering both contrast and color harmony between the subtitle colors and underlying movie scenes. It also prevents sudden color transitions between consecutive subtitles. Our result...[ Read more ]

Subtitling, or captioning, refers to the process of presenting textual information about a video scene usually at the bottom of the display. This process is heavily employed in movies in order to provide a printed translation of the dialogue. It is also commonly used to provide a transcription of a program which is useful for the hearing impaired or in environments where the audio is intentionally muted. In this thesis we present the first method to automatically colorize subtitles in a movie. Our subtitle colorization process is formulated as a shortest path problem that optimizes for all subtitle colors considering both contrast and color harmony between the subtitle colors and underlying movie scenes. It also prevents sudden color transitions between consecutive subtitles. Our results show that colorizing subtitles can simultaneously improve the visual appeal and readability of captioned text. We hope that this problem will find wide applicability in the movie, TV, and entertainment industries.