Automatic detection of TV commercials - Potentials, IEEE

0278-6648/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE 9 TV advertising commercials are a critical marketing tool for many companies. Their interspersion within regular broadcast television programming can be entertaining, informing, annoying or a sales goldmine depending on one’s viewpoint. As a result, there are two major reasons for being able to detect commercial segments within television broadcasts. Interestingly, these two applications’ goals—at least indirectly—are at odds with each other. One application seeks to identify and track when specific commercials are broadcast. Advertisers, in particular, like to verify that their contracts with broadcasters are fulfilled as promised. (The price of a commercial depends primarily on the popularity of the show it interrupts. The more people who are the product’s demographics watching that program the better and usually the higher the cost, e.g. the Super Bowl. Thus, the advertiser wants to ensure that the commercial ran during the Super Bowl and not on a “That Girl” rerun at 4 am.) The other group wants to detect commercials for the purpose of eliminating them from their recordings. This group is viewers who want to watch their recorded television shows without the annoyance of commercials. Video database maintainers would also appreciate the ability to automatically edit out commercials in stored shows and thereby decrease storage requirements. Of course, advertisers are strongly opposed to such devices because that defeats the purpose of the commercials. This article will discuss several algorithms that have been experimentally used to detect commercials, as well as devices that are currently available for this purpose.