TV Commercial Detection Based on Shot Change and Text Extraction

A new algorithm is proposed for TV commercial detection from color video in this paper. High shot change frequency and "still" shots of the trademark information, which are two basic characteristics of TV commercial, are exploited to distinguish commercials from general programs. Our commercial retrieval system based on shot change and text detection is realized through a slide window. First, histogram difference is computed on consecutive images and then the four common shot transitions including cut, dissolve, fade in/out and wipe are detected. Our text detection algorithm based on maximum gradient difference, allows fast filtering of scan lines without text. A commercial is determined either if its shot change frequency is satisfied or if its trademark information is detected. Performance evaluation shows that our algorithm performs well with relatively high detection accuracy for different kinds of programs when we involved the text detection, which is an important contribution of this paper.