Television Logo Killer

[dave_k]

Great project!
The problem you will have is that the watermarks broadcasters use nowadays are rarely static. Some are animated to begin with, others are customised (ie - coming up next) and some change position on screen from lower-right to upper-right depending on programming.  Then there is the added fun of lower-third graphics which are sprinkled through programs from time to time.

[Fungus]

I didn't notice this  at all when I was developing the unit - the position was stable over a period of at least several weeks. And on ABC (the government broadcaster) too! Perhaps they reckon it will be good for the economy if everyone has to buy a new TV...

Or maybe they assume you only ever watch their channel so it doesn't matter. 

PS: The ones I've seen do this drift the logo over a matter of minutes. It's not hard to see it moving if you're paying attention.

[rdl]

What is the point to having those damn logos on screen constantly? I find them distracting and highly annoying. National Geographic is one of the worst. Do TV broadcasters think it's good to intentionally piss off their viewers? When they first became technically possible the US had strict rules about when and how long they could appear (not very often and not very long) but I guess that was deregulated long ago.

[miguelvp]

What is the point to having those damn logos on screen constantly? I find them distracting and highly annoying. National Geographic is one of the worst. Do TV broadcasters think it's good to intentionally piss off their viewers? When they first became technically possible the US had strict rules about when and how long they could appear (not very often and not very long) but I guess that was deregulated long ago.

Copyright?

[Fungus]

What is the point to having those damn logos on screen constantly? I find them distracting and highly annoying. National Geographic is one of the worst. Do TV broadcasters think it's good to intentionally piss off their viewers? When they first became technically possible the US had strict rules about when and how long they could appear (not very often and not very long) but I guess that was deregulated long ago.

Copyright?

How can it possibly prevent copying or enforce copyright?

I'll use Occam's razor: It's just megalomania by pointy-haired-bosses.

(sound of keyboard)

Yep, Wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_on-screen_graphic

It's all about "brand recognition". 

[Kilrah]

And copyright.

watermarking also helps minimize off-the-air copyright infringement (for example, the distribution of a current series' episodes on DVD): the watermarked content is easily differentiated from "official" DVD releases, and can help law-enforcement efforts by identifying not only the station an illegally copied broadcast was captured from, but usually the actual date of the broadcast as well.

[KE5FX]

Cool project, I've thought about this problem before in a couple of different contexts.  Did you give any thought to using autocorrelation to infer the location of the logo?  The correlator would run continuously at timescales of a minute or so, and any portions of the frame that exceed a given autocorrelation coefficient would be subtracted from all outgoing frames.

[johnwa]

Thanks KE5FX, I had thought about this a bit in general terms, but had not worked out the specifics. Do you mean actually deriving the logo in real-time from the video stream, or simply finding the spatial position of a predetermined logo? The former might be feasible, though i think it would depend on the intensity distribution of each pixel in the image being uniform. You might end up turning all the letterbox bars to grey unless some fairly advanced heuristics were used. Perhaps I will try some further experiments sometime.

[apelly]

It may or may not be of use/interest to you, but there has been a bunch of code written for mythtv that identifies channel logos for the purpose of skipping advertisements automatically.

I'll look for a link for you if you want.

[mpicker21]

apelly beat me to it but yeah MythTV is a great open source project that does logo detection. It combines that with scene detection to get the actual edges of commercials as there is usually a slight delay for the logo to come in after the show resumes. They also use other techniques IIRC like CC detection to further improve accuracy.

[bitslice]

This is one of the cleverest things I've seen for a while - to take a problem, find a loophole and present a fix which involves a considerable level of design skill. Much more laudable than the usual age-old Lego block solutions we can use to fix most problems.

[jonovid]

because the logo typically goes away during ads

you may have a potential television advertising blocker or  at least a way to detect television advertising and automatically lower the audio level.
 a potential new television design feature,  the Ad kill Button
So keep working on this one, somebody may want it!        But not problem here, I stopped watching broadcast television Years ago, IMO  television is just a HD Video Monitor for Gaming or YouTube.