System for rapid subtitling

A system for rapid subtitling of audiovisual sequences was developed, and evaluated. This new system resulted in average time-savings of 50% over the previous work in the field. To subtitle a 27-minute English lecture, users saved 2.2 hours, spending an average of 1.9 hours timing the monologue. Subtitling a 20-minute Japanese animation resulted in similar savings. While subtitling is widely practiced, traditional speech boundary detection algorithms have proven insufficient for adoption when subtitling audiovisual sequences. Human-edited timing of subtitles is a dull and laborious exercise, yet with some human-guidance, basic systems may accurately align transcripts and translations in the presence of divergent speakers, multiple languages, and background noise. Since no known, fully-automatic recognition systems operate with sufficient accuracy for production-grade subtitle times, during playback the system disclosed treats user-supplied times as a priori data and adjusts those times using extracted features from concurrent data streams. In the application's oracle subsystem, packaged algorithms called oracles preprocess, filter, and present media data, using that data to adjust user-supplied times.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Leonard, Sean Joseph

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Harold Abelson.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36791

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36791