Content-Based TV Stream Analysis Techniques toward Building a Catch-Up TV Service

One of the promises of Digital Television is the possibility of creating interactive and innovative television services, like catch-up TV. However, these services need external resources, coming from the channels themselves or from manual annotation. In this paper, a system for automatically building a Catch-up TV service from the available EPG and the broadcasted TV stream, is presented. The system combines several content-based techniques for extracting exact program boundaries from the TV stream. Traditional commercial detection and recognition methods are used, as well as novel techniques to detect and classify repetitions. Identification of the TV program is then performed by matching the detected boundaries with the EPG. Extensive experiments on three weeks of TV assess the effectiveness of the proposed system.