A Television Channel Real-Time Detector using Smartphones

Recently, people have been interested in sharing what they are watching on TV, allowing the development of Social TV Applications often based on mobile devices. In this context, this paper proposes IRTR (Improved Real-Time TV-channel Recognition): a new method aimed at recognizing in real time (live) what people are watching on TV without any active user interaction. IRTR uses the audio signal of the TV program recorded by smartphones and is performed through two steps: i) fingerprint extraction and ii) TV channel real-time identification. Step i) is based on the computation of the Audio Fingerprint (AF). The AF computation has been taken from the literature and has been improved in terms of power consumption and computation speed to make the smartphone implementation feasible by using an ad hoc cost function aimed at selecting the best set of AF parameters. Step ii) is aimed at deciding the TV channel the user is watching. This step is performed using a likelihood estimation algorithm proposed in this paper. The consumed power, computation and response time, and correct decision rate of IRTR, evaluated through experimental measures, show very satisfying results such as a correct decision rate of about 95%, about 2s of computation time, and above 90% power saving with respect to the literature.