  Textual overlays are often used in social media videos as people who watch
them without the sound would otherwise miss essential information conveyed in
the audio stream. This is why extraction of those overlays can serve as an
important meta-data source, e.g. for content classification or retrieval tasks.
In this work, we present a robust method for extracting textual overlays from
videos that builds up on multiple neural network architectures. The proposed
solution relies on several processing steps: keyframe extraction, text
detection and text recognition. The main component of our system, i.e. the text
recognition module, is inspired by a convolutional recurrent neural network
architecture and we improve its performance using synthetically generated
dataset of over 600,000 images with text prepared by authors specifically for
this task. We also develop a filtering method that reduces the amount of
overlapping text phrases using Levenshtein distance and further boosts system's
performance. The final accuracy of our solution reaches over 80A% and is au
pair with state-of-the-art methods.
