Development and Implementation of Methods for the Recognition of Commercials in Digital Television
Most of todays television stations have to show commercials to finance themself. These adverts often interrupt the programme. For live watching the viewer has to live with it. In case of recorded programmes the viewer is able to cut the commercials out. Especially in digital TV this is possible after recording is completed without any loss in quality.
Visual and acustic characteristics can be used to tell the difference between commercial and non-commercial. In digital television additional characteristics of the data stream like changing header values or bitrates can be helpful, too.
A feature often used for commercial recognition is the logo of the TV station, which is not visible in adverts. But logo detection is becoming harder (animated or changing logos on special events) and less reliable (few seconds too late visible again). Therefore simpler and more reliable methods have to be found.
An algorithmn shall be developed and implemented which parses and partly decodes (I-frames only, sound) the MPEG-2 data stream of a recorded television programme and recognizes the commercial breaks. It reads the recordings created by the programm vdr and write the cutting marks in the vdr-file marks.vdr. Then the replay function of vdr can be used by the viewer to control the cutting marks, and finally vdr's video cutter is started to create a commercial-free version of the recording.