1. A computer-implemented method for the identification and interpretation of text captions in an encoded video stream of digital video signals, said method comprising: sampling by selecting frames for video analysis; decoding by converting each of said frames selected into a digitized color image; performing edge detection for generating a gray scale image; binarizing by converting said gray scale image into a bi-level image by means of a thresholding operation; compressing groups of consecutive pixel values in said binary image; mapping said consecutive pixel values into a binary value; and separating groups of connected pixels and determining whether they are likely to be part of a text region in the image or not.