A fast method for animated TV logo detection

As a recent trend some TV stations prefer to use animated logos, therefore the detection of the presence of an animated TV logo emerges as a new requirement for certain applications. In this paper we present a novel method for the detection of animated television logos in real-time. The main idea is to handle all frames of the animated logo in a unified manner. For this purpose a unified logo boundary representation is utilized. In the training stage, the boundaries of the animated logo from each frame are placed in a single set. During detection, a voting-based decision scheme is performed in order to determine the presence of the trained logo. Furthermore robustness of the method is improved by incorporating negative clues regarding the existence of the animated logo obtained from the region of interest. Aforementioned clues are unified in order to reach a final decision by using effective combination rules. Finally, time windowing is used for eliminating false positives with short durations. The proposed method is examined through typical broadcast data and promising results are obtained.