Automatic location and removal of video logos

Most commercial television channels utilize video logos, which can be considered as a form of a visible watermark, as a declaration of intellectual property ownership. They are also used as a symbol of authorization to rebroadcast when original logos are used in conjunction with newer logos. An unfortunate side effect of such logos is the concomitant decrease in the viewing pleasure. In this paper, we utilize the temporal correlation of the video frames in order to detect and remove the video logos. In the video logo detection part, as an initial step, the logo boundary box is first located by utilizing a distance threshold of video frames and is further refined by employing a comparison of edge lengths. Second, our proposed Bayesian classifier framework locates fragments of logos called logo-lets. In this framework, we systematically integrate the prior knowledge about the location of the video logos and their intrinsic local features in order to achieve a robust detection result. In our logo removal part, after marking the logo region, a matching technique is employed to find the best replacement patch for the marked region within that video shot. This technique is found to be useful for small logos. Furthermore, we extend the image inpainting technique to videos. Unlike the use of two-dimensional gradients in the image inpainting technique, we inpaint the logo region of video frames by using three-dimensional gradients exploiting the temporal correlations in video. The advantage of this algorithm is that the inpainted regions are consistent with the surrounding texture and hence the result is perceptually pleasing. We present the results of our implementation and demonstrate the utility of our method for logos removal.