Character-Centric Understanding of Animated Movies

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gui, Zhongrui, Xie, Junyu, Han, Tengda, Xie, Weidi, Zisserman, Andrew
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908540153626624
author Gui, Zhongrui
Xie, Junyu
Han, Tengda
Xie, Weidi
Zisserman, Andrew
author_facet Gui, Zhongrui
Xie, Junyu
Han, Tengda
Xie, Weidi
Zisserman, Andrew
contents Animated movies are captivating for their unique character designs and imaginative storytelling, yet they pose significant challenges for existing recognition systems. Unlike the consistent visual patterns detected by conventional face recognition methods, animated characters exhibit extreme diversity in their appearance, motion, and deformation. In this work, we propose an audio-visual pipeline to enable automatic and robust animated character recognition, and thereby enhance character-centric understanding of animated movies. Central to our approach is the automatic construction of an audio-visual character bank from online sources. This bank contains both visual exemplars and voice (audio) samples for each character, enabling subsequent multi-modal character recognition despite long-tailed appearance distributions. Building on accurate character recognition, we explore two downstream applications: Audio Description (AD) generation for visually impaired audiences, and character-aware subtitling for the hearing impaired. To support research in this domain, we introduce CMD-AM, a new dataset of 75 animated movies with comprehensive annotations. Our character-centric pipeline demonstrates significant improvements in both accessibility and narrative comprehension for animated content over prior face-detection-based approaches. For the code and dataset, visit https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/animated_ad/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12204
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Character-Centric Understanding of Animated Movies
Gui, Zhongrui
Xie, Junyu
Han, Tengda
Xie, Weidi
Zisserman, Andrew
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Animated movies are captivating for their unique character designs and imaginative storytelling, yet they pose significant challenges for existing recognition systems. Unlike the consistent visual patterns detected by conventional face recognition methods, animated characters exhibit extreme diversity in their appearance, motion, and deformation. In this work, we propose an audio-visual pipeline to enable automatic and robust animated character recognition, and thereby enhance character-centric understanding of animated movies. Central to our approach is the automatic construction of an audio-visual character bank from online sources. This bank contains both visual exemplars and voice (audio) samples for each character, enabling subsequent multi-modal character recognition despite long-tailed appearance distributions. Building on accurate character recognition, we explore two downstream applications: Audio Description (AD) generation for visually impaired audiences, and character-aware subtitling for the hearing impaired. To support research in this domain, we introduce CMD-AM, a new dataset of 75 animated movies with comprehensive annotations. Our character-centric pipeline demonstrates significant improvements in both accessibility and narrative comprehension for animated content over prior face-detection-based approaches. For the code and dataset, visit https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/animated_ad/.
title Character-Centric Understanding of Animated Movies
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12204