A TV commercial retrieval system based on audio features

In spite of new digital platforms, television (TV) continues to be the most influential advertising medium. The advertisers need to verify that their commercials are broadcasted on TV in the number and time they pay for them. Nowadays, this job is done manually by visual inspection of recordings of the broadcasted signal every day, consuming a lot of human resources. We present a system that automatize the process of identification of TV commercials. It is based on the detection of target commercials using their audio features. With the purpose of reducing the time of detection and the storage requirements, it uses audio features in a compact transformed domain. The algorithm is based on the similarities in the cepstral domain of the commercial to be detected and the audio recording of the TV signal. The results show that the system is able to obtain a satisfactory detection rate in a short time (detection rate above 90% with no false alarms), allowing the analysis of long recordings in a fast way.