An improved automatic commercial detection system

TV commercials that intervene between program segments are essential to TV broadcasters and are undesirable for typical TV audience. Detection of TV commercials is thus important for many applications. In this paper, we propose a new TV commercial detection algorithm for digital TV broadcasting in Taiwan. The proposed method integrates audio and video features. The employed visual characteristics include the still pictures, program title, and rating logos. The employed audio characteristics include short silence, starting music, and ending music. The scenarios for which program segment ends (commercial starts) and program segment starts (commercial ends) are carefully analyzed to facilitate joint audio-visual detection. Experiments show that the proposed method can detect all commercial intervals with no or little time error.