Broadcasters are demonstrating interest in building digital archives of their assets for reuse of archive materials for TV programs, on-line availability, and archiving. This requires tools for video indexing and retrieval by content exploiting high-level video information such as that contained in super-imposed text captions. In this paper we present a method to automatically detect and localize captions in digital video using temporal and spatial local properties of salient points in video frames. Results of experiments on both high-resolutionDV sequences and standard VHS videos are presented and discussed.