Design of color-code system for time-stamping broadcast video

For the purpose of video indexing and monitoring of broadcast TV streams, it is needed to associate any frame of a broadcast stream with its current broadcasting time. We propose a new time-stamping method to associate any frame of a broadcast stream accurately with its corresponding broadcasting time by stamping a structured color-code visually representing the current broadcasting time on each frame of a broadcast stream. The experimental results show that a structured color-code with brightness calibration can be perfectly recognized in real-time. The robustness of the structured color-code is also demonstrated by implementing a real-time video indexing system that can generate metadata containing segmentation information described by broadcasting time. TV viewers can interactively view broadcast streams recorded in their set-top boxes with the corresponding metadata delivered.