TV Commercial Break Detector
For the Design Project course, one half of the B.Sc. graduation project, a TV Commercial Break remover had to be designed and implemented. This was done in a group of four. The idea was to detect and remove commercial breaks from a TV recording.
The project eventually didn't meet the requirement of removing commercial breaks, but it was very succesfull at detecting the commercial breaks. It detected them through various cues, and important visual cue were completely black frames between commercial breaks, and between the regular programming and the commercial breaks. Besides that the videoframe was entirely black, there was also an audio cue indicative of a commercial break: the black frame was nearly silent.
Another interesing feature found in commercial breaks, and used in their detection, was the use of a so-called `exciter'. An exciter is a type of sound enhancer, used to create a so called ‘hot sound’. When people watch TV they think that the volume level increases during the commercial break. This is because of the exciter that distributes the sound over the frequencies people are most sensitive to. The exciter-detection algorithm used a FFT to calculate the sound intensity in the different frequency bands. The output of the FFT is analysed to check if an exciter filter is used.
Below are the links to the final report written, and a .zip archive with the code. The actual code is a plugin for VLC, so for compilation, an entire VLC build environment will have to be setup.