Audio and video processing for automatic TV advertisement detection

Abstract

As a partner in the Centre for Digital Video Processing, the Visual Media Processing Group at Dublin City University conducts research and development in the area of digital video management. The current stage of development is demonstrated on our Web-based digital video system called Físchlár [1,2], which provides for efficient recording,
\nanalyzing, browsing and viewing of digitally captured television programmes. In order to make the browsing of
\nprogramme material more efficient, users have requested the option of automatically deleting advertisement breaks.
\nOur initial work on this task focused on locating ad-breaks by detecting patterns of silent black frames which separate
\nindividual advertisements and/or complete ad-breaks in most commercial TV stations. However, not all TV stations use
\nsilent, black frames to flag ad-breaks. We therefore decided to attempt to detect advertisements using the rate of shot cuts in the digitised TV signal. This paper describes the implementation and performance of both methods of ad-break
\ndetection.