Real-time subtitle synchronization in live television programs

The number of live programs in broadcast and IPTV Digital Television is increasing as the offer of pre-recorded multimedia in Internet television and video on-demand grows. For many people, subtitles are the only way to access the audio of television programs and in live subtitling environments the audio transcription process will deliver the corresponding subtitles several seconds after the speech fragment has been received. The disturbing effect of the resulting lack of synchronism is still a challenging issue in the accessibility to live-multimedia. This paper presents the application of an Automatic Speech Recognition and synchronizing system, tailored for three different live television environments (i.e. news programs, sports, magazine). Individual subtitle delays are measured and used to synchronize video/audio and subtitles before delivering the TV program in a dedicated IPTV channel.