arXiv Computer Vision By Zhongrui Gui, Junyu Xie, Tengda Han, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman

As the Story Unfolds: Watching a Film and Identifying Characters as a Human Does

Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →

The paper introduces the character naming task, where a model must identify which visible character in a film bears a name mentioned in dialogue, using only the movie’s video and dialogue without external cast lists or actor photos. It highlights the difficulty of name resolution due to cinematic cues such as shot-reverse-shot structure, self-introduction, direct address, third-party reference, gaze, and temporal continuity. The authors provide a dataset and annotations, develop a video-and-dialogue model, compare it with large multimodal language models, and propose a progressive framework for building a character bank as the film unfolds.

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