Detecting and Naming Actors in Movies Using Generative Appearance Models

We introduce a generative model for learning person and costume specific detectors from labeled examples. We demonstrate the model on the task of localizing and naming actors in long video sequences. More specifically, the actor's head and shoulders are each represented as a constellation of optional color regions. Detection can proceed despite changes in view-point and partial occlusions. We explain how to learn the models from a small number of labeled key frames or video tracks, and how to detect novel appearances of the actors in a maximum likelihood framework. We present results on a challenging movie example, with 81% recall in actor detection (coverage) and 89% precision in actor identification (naming).