A Confidence Based Recognition System for TV Commercial Extraction

Automatic real-time recognition of TV commercials is an essential step for TV broadcast monitoring. It comprises two basic tasks: rapid detection of known commercials that are stored in a database, and accurate recognition of unknown ones that appear for the first time in TV streaming. The existing approaches, however, can not perform robust commercial detection because they highly rely on the assumption that black frames are inserted before commercial breaks. In this paper, we propose a novel confidencebased recognition system to address this challenging issues. Those known commercials are detected by applying a fast search algorithm to a pre-built commercial database, and those unknown ones are determined by managing a buffer containing possible yet unconfirmed commercial spots. A new concept of confidence level is defined for each candidate, therefore commercial breaks can be accurately determined based on a confidence threshold. Experimental results using two 48-hour TV broadcasting indicate the high performance of our proposed method.