  The goal of this paper is the automatic identification of characters in TV
and feature film material. In contrast to standard approaches to this task,
which rely on the weak supervision afforded by transcripts and subtitles, we
propose a new method requiring only a cast list. This list is used to obtain
images of actors from freely available sources on the web, providing a form of
partial supervision for this task. In using images of actors to recognize
characters, we make the following three contributions: (i) We demonstrate that
an automated semi-supervised learning approach is able to adapt from the
actor's face to the character's face, including the face context of the hair;
(ii) By building voice models for every character, we provide a bridge between
frontal faces (for which there is plenty of actor-level supervision) and
profile (for which there is very little or none); and (iii) by combining face
context and speaker identification, we are able to identify characters with
partially occluded faces and extreme facial poses. Results are presented on the
TV series 'Sherlock' and the feature film 'Casablanca'. We achieve the
state-of-the-art on the Casablanca benchmark, surpassing previous methods that
have used the stronger supervision available from transcripts.
