  The text data present in overlaid bands convey brief descriptions of news
events in broadcast videos. The process of text extraction becomes challenging
as overlay text is presented in widely varying formats and often with animation
effects. We note that existing edge density based methods are well suited for
our application on account of their simplicity and speed of operation. However,
these methods are sensitive to thresholds and have high false positive rates.
In this paper, we present a contrast enhancement based preprocessing stage for
overlay text detection and a parameter free edge density based scheme for
efficient text band detection. The second contribution of this paper is a novel
approach for multiple text region tracking with a formal identification of all
possible detection failure cases. The tracking stage enables us to establish
the temporal presence of text bands and their linking over time. The third
contribution is the adoption of Tesseract OCR for the specific task of overlay
text recognition using web news articles. The proposed approach is tested and
found superior on news videos acquired from three Indian English television
news channels along with benchmark datasets.
