Television Commercial Detection

Results

We have implemented a television commercial detector that successfully identifies commercial transitions in real-time through logo detection for eight channels. When a logo is present on the screen, our detector has zero error in correctly classifying a frame as part of a television show. The limitations of our system present themselves when a channel does not use a consistent presence of a logo during an entire show. We demonstrated this with five channels playing on a continuous loop at Design Expo and options of all eight channels during our presentation. We achieved all of our goals including stretch goals of implementing a second video/audio feed to play during commercials and having a large number of channels working.

University of Michigan 2013 Winter Engineering Design Expo Demonstration

To demo our project for both the class and the Design Expo, we created DVDs to capture only the transitions to and from commercials on each network. This is in contrast to our originally captured clips, which were several hours long and contained the entirety of each television program. For each of our 8 networks, we chose one particular show and found the following: one transition from commercial to television program and one transition from television program to commercial. We took these two transitions and edited them together, as to simulate the true transitions a user would see when watching these programs. This was done for each network, and each of these clips (around 1 minute in duration each) was edited together onto one DVD. For the Design Expo, we had 5 of our 8 networks running on a loop, to simulate how our device worked on multiple channels.

Final Demonstration for Class

For our final presentation, we had all 8 networks on one DVD. The difference between the two demos was during our final presentation, our clips for each network were separated by chapters, and each clip ended by going back to the menu. This allowed us to make our final demo much more interactive, letting us play whichever clips our fellow students and staff wanted.

During both demonstrations, we showed the user two separate monitors. One monitor was connected to our device, which would show the primary television show (with audio) until a commercial, at which time it would switch to our secondary program (also with audio). This would stay on our secondary program until the primary feed was finished with its commercial, at which point it would resume playing the primary feed. Out second monitor served to show the user the uninterrupted, streaming signal that would be seen if our device was not in use. This would show the primary feed the entire time, showing that the commercial was in fact going on during the time that the secondary feed was being shown and heard.