Automatic detection of TV commercial blocks: A new approach based on digital on-screen graphics classification

In this paper, a simple, yet effective method for TV commercials detection is proposed, that exploits the presence or absence, in the screen, of the broadcaster logo (or TV channel logo). The approach is based on a digital on-screen graphics (DoG) detection and classification mechanism, targeting to detect and distinguish TV channel logos from other types of DoGs. No pre-built database is required, as the proposed solution is able to gather its own collection of DoGs from the broadcasted videos. A continuous update and control of the DoGs database is performed, thus allowing to conclude about the nature of each DoG and to classify each video segment as Regular Program or Commercial Block. For the used test video dataset, corresponding to recordings from three Portuguese TV channels, a minimum accuracy of 93,9% on commercials detection was achieved; furthermore, the measured processing time suggests that the proposed solution should enable real-time (i.e., while recording) detection of commercial blocks.