Lightweight TV logo recognition based on image moment

TV logo recognition is one of the suggested solutions for preventing unauthorized duplication and redistribution. The major problem of the previous logo recognition is that the matching process against the reference logos requires much time. Since millions of minutes of TV programs are produced and broadcasted every day, an efficient algorithm is necessary. In this paper, we propose lightweight logo recognition using an image moment. An image moment represents a geometrical feature by a numerical low dimensional vector and thus matching can be achieved by a simple distance metric. Since an image moment itself is not so robust to noise, we introduce conspicuousness of a transparent logo according to visual properties of its background and surrounding regions. A validation experiment using the actual TV programs achieves much faster processing than the existing method with only a small degradation in accuracy. In the proposed method, computational complexity is independent of the number of the reference logos and the size of the logo region.