Video Outage Detection: Algorithm and evaluation

We present a video outage detection algorithm (VODA) that detects catastrophic failures in video systems by mimicking human behavior. VODA uses a continuity detector for video, audio, and motion, along with blackness, silence, and stillness detection. An outage is declared when all individual features exhibit a sudden drop; an alarm is generated when an outage lasts over two seconds. We analyze the performance of VODA on a large corpus of movie and TV episodes, and we show it has good performance when applied to 160 hours of recorded broadcast TV.