Audio and video processing for automatic TV advertisement detection

As a partner in the Centre for Digital Video Processing, the Visual Media Processing Group at Dublin City University conducts research and development in the area of digital video management. The current stage of development is demonstrated on our Web-based digital video system called Fischlar [1,2], which provides for efficient recording, analyzing, browsing and viewing of digitally captured television programmes. In order to make the browsing of programme material more efficient, users have requested the option of automatically deleting advertisement breaks. Our initial work on this task focused on locating ad-breaks by detecting patterns of silent black frames which separate individual advertisements and/or complete ad-breaks in most commercial TV stations. However, not all TV stations use silent, black frames to flag ad-breaks. We therefore decided to attempt to detect advertisements using the rate of shot cuts in the digitised TV signal. This paper describes the implementation and performance of both methods of ad-break detection.