AutoTC : Automatic Time-Code recognition for the purpose of synchronisation of subtitles in the broadcasting of motion pictures using the SMPTE standard : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science, School of Engineering and Advanced Technology (S.E.A.T.) at Massey University, (Albany), New Zealand

Abstract

Time-coding requires manual marking of the in/out points of every dialogue spoken in the lm. This process is very manual, cumbersome and time-consuming which takes about 8-10 hours for an average lm duration of 2 and a half hours. AutoTC, a multi-threaded client-server application has been built for the automatic recognition of time-codes for the purpose of automatic synchronisation of subtitles in the broadcasting of Motion Pictures. It involves generating time-codes programmatically based on the input video's frame rate to be subtitled and using the audio to recognise in/out points automatically using the principles of Voice Activity Detection. Results show that the time taken to recognise time-codes automatically is approximately 1/6th compared to the the time taken by a professional time-coder using `Poliscript'[18], a commercial tool used in the production of subtitles. `IN-SYNC', a new performance metric, has been proposed to evaluate the accuracy of the developed system which will foster further research and development in the eld of automatic subtitling in an attempt to make it the de-facto standard. The application has been tested on the NOIZEUS[30] corpus giving an IN-SYNC accuracy of 65% on clean data with 6 mis-detections and an average of 51.56% on noisy data with 13 mis-detections which is very encouraging. The application can also send data to the MOSES[32] server developed for producing draft translations from Hindi to English which will make the subtitling process much faster, e cient and quality-centric.