Television Stream Structuring with Program Guides

We propose in this paper an original approach to the TV stream structuring problem. The goal of our work is to automatically break the TV stream into telecasts and advertisings and to label each telecast with its genre. One can think the TV stream structuring problem can be solved by an alignment of the program guide on the stream. But our study shows that, in average, only 25% of the telecasts per day are presented in the program guide. Hence, our method consists in improving statistically these program guides in order to reduce the TV stream structuring problem to a simple alignment problem. The improvement consists in adding the missing telecasts. We present an original system that lays on the modeling of past TV schedules by a contextual hidden Markov model and a regression tree. Interesting results are presented at the end of the paper