TV settop box design for processing text messages based on graph theory

摘要

This paper proposes a TV settop box design for processing text messages (captions). With this settop box, a user could catch the text messages in which the user is interested from a TV program, such as news or sports, while watching a program coming from another source. The settop box extracts text messages from the TV program and pastes the extracted results onto frames of the program being watched before they are actually displayed on the screen. Although text messages are composed by characters, they are not recognized by any means. Instead, text messages are extracted and treated as bitmap images. A graph-theory- based algorithm was implemented and tested in the settop box to process text messages in real-time. This algorithm could correctly and efficiently process text messages and most importantly, could be applied on messages in any language without modifications.