This application is the U.S. National Phase under 35 U.S.C. §371 of International Application No. PCT/CN2008/071039, filed on May 22, 2008, the disclosure of which Application is incorporated by reference herein.
The present invention relates to method for identifying motion video/audio content, more particularly, the present invention relates to a method for identifying fingerprints of motion video content.
The so called term “fingerprint” appearing in this specification means a series of dot information, in which each dot information is selected from a frame of pattern of television signals, and a plurality of frames can be selected from the television signals, and one or more dot data can be selected from one frame of pattern of television signals, so that the so called “fingerprint” can be used to uniquely identify the said television signals.
Because of digital compression technology, more television channels are transmitted over the same analog spectrum, and there are more channels for viewers to watch. Digitally compressed video and audio signals are binary data streams that can be transmitted, stored and played out as computer data files or streams. Therefore, digital video/audio data are typically handled in digital forms during production, transmission and storage phases.
Organizing digital video content is becoming a major challenge for all content owners, video and broadband internet service providers, and even home users. This is because, unlike text, video content cannot be searched and identified easily by computers. Unlike audio, video content data has far larger data size. In addition, it is very difficult and inefficient to identify video content by human visual inspections since the process is very time-consuming and expensive. These factors makes it difficult to effectively organize, archive, and search video content. However, the need for searching and identifying video content is increasingly important with applications in video surveillance, copyright content monitoring, television commercials monitoring, intelligent video advertising, and government regulatory television programming monitoring.
Therefore, there is a need to identify motion video content efficiently and automatically, and with minimal or no human interactions.
There is also a need to identify motion video content without having access to the full resolution digitized video content data.
There is also a need to identify motion video content at the possible highest speed with minimal storage capacity required and possible minimal data transfer bandwidth.
There is a need to provide a method for facilitating the archiving and search of video content without a huge storage capacity required, and to be able to search the information easily at low hardware cost. There is also a need to collect statistics and extraction additional information from the archived video information automatically.
It is object of the present invention to provide a method for identifying motion video/audio content to facilitate the automatic identification, archiving and search of video content.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method for identifying motion video/audio content to extract fingerprint information from video content for the purpose of archiving without the huge storage capacity required.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method for identifying motion video/audio content to search through video fingerprint data for identifying historical recording of video content.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method for identifying motion video/audio content, that can be used to identify motion video content by first extracting information from a given video content segment and use the extracted information to further automatically identify the same video content if it is ever to appear again in a different video data stream.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method for identifying motion video/audio content, which is used for extracting information from a given video content data, so-called the fingerprinting process, and shows how to use the fingerprint data to seek a match within a different video content.
Therefore, according to the present invention, there is provided a method for method for identifying motion video/audio content, by means of comparing a video A to a registered video B so as to determine if they are originally the same as each other, wherein said method at least comprises the steps of extracting a fingerprint A from the video A; and searching from a fingerprint database for a pre-extracted and registered fingerprint B of the video B by means of comparison of fingerprint A with a sliding window of a possible fingerprint B, so as to determine that the video A is identical to the video B if a match is found.
According to the present invention, the method for extracting a fingerprint data from video/audio signals can be of archiving without the huge storage capacity required.
In the context of this specification, discussions are focused on the handling and processing of video signals. The method can be extended to audio signals by using variations of the techniques and will not be discussed here.
Specially, discussions are focused on the handling of video signals, although in most cases, video signals come together with audio signals as an integral part of the audio/video program. The audio signal will be considered in synchronization with the video signal. Fingerprint operations on the video signal identify the video content as well as the associated audio content. Therefore, in this specification, discussions are limited on dealing with fingerprint operations on video signal only.
It is also assumed that the video signal has been digitized. It's possible to extend the idea to analog video content as well by first digitizing the analog video signal into digital video frames before applying the methods described herein. Therefore, it does not show how to deal with analog video content in this specification.
In addition, it is assumed that the digital video content is in uncompressed formats and organized as digital video frames. For compressed video data stream, such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or other compressed formats, decompression (or decoding) of the video data stream into digital video frames is required before applying the method used herein.
Lastly, it is assumed that all video frames are in progressive format, which means that each video frame is displayed at the decoder together. For interlaced video frames, the frame is displayed in two separate time instances as two (top and bottom) fields. In this case, it is assumed that all of the processing described below applies to the fields.
In this invention, it is provided a method for identifying motion video/audio content.
Referring to
Next, it is to describe the fingerprint extraction process in greater detail.
The sub-sampling operation can be illustrated in
Preferably, in such a sampling scheme, the samples should be taken as evenly distributed in the frame as possible, with the center of the frame as the center of the sub-sampling.
One preferable sub-sampling of the frame is shown in
Of course, there can be other methods of sub-sampling, but it will continue to use the above sub-sampling scheme to describe the rest of the methods. Those skilled in the art will be able to expand the method to other sub-sampling schemes, with more or fewer than 5 samples per video frame, or sub-sampling at varying number of pixels per video frame.
Preferably, the sampling scheme is independent of the frame resolution or aspect ratio, making it more robust for dealing with video content of different resolutions and aspect ratios.
If more samples are to be sampled from a single image, preferably, the sampling locations contains the previously defined 5 sample locations. For example,
Next, it is to focus on the 5 sample constellation and discuss how to organize the sample data into what the so-called fingerprint data after multiple video images are sampled.
The sub-sampled values are saved for each of the frames. From the above description, it is noted that 5 frame samples are obtained for each video frame. It can repeat this process for several consecutive N video frames. For example, it can sub-sample N=50 consecutive video frames. And then organize the sub-sampled values into a 5×50 array. This sub-sampling process is shown in
This array is the so-called the fingerprint of the video content. From the above description, it is noted that the fingerprint covers only 50 video frames, for PAL video format, it's 2 seconds worth of video, for NTSC, it's less then 2 seconds. If it can uniquely identify this N video frames through the sub-sampled values, then it can significantly reduce the computation and storage required for the identification.
In this particular example, the fingerprint only identifies the 50 video frames within the video content, but not the remainder of the video content. For most video content, where the content titles are usually static, uniquely identifying a segment of the content is sufficient to uniquely identifying the entire video content title.
Alternatively, the sampling may be done only on some of the video frames. For example, it may be done only once every other frame, as shown in
For video content where segments of which may be re-arranged, a group of video images may not be sufficient to uniquely identify video content if some of the sections are re-arranged.
In these cases, it needs to do sub-sampling of more frames. Therefore, there are provided several preferable ways to determine the number of video frames to sub-sample, that is:
to sub-sample N consecutive video frames on somewhere in the video content, for example at the beginning of the video content;
to sub-sample N consecutive video frames at fixed time intervals;
to sub-sample one video frame every N consecutive frames (this is also shown in
to sub-sample all of the video frames for the entire video content title.
This can be illustrated in
Preferably, samples from consecutive video frames are organized in a continuous two-dimensional array of sampled values. This sampled array is the so-called the fingerprint for the sampled video content.
In
In
From the above, it is noted that depending on the sampling method used, there may be more than one fingerprint arrays for a given video content. The video fingerprint, represented as separate groups of continuous arrays, can be used to uniquely represent the video content from which the samples are obtained.
Besides sampling, the fingerprint extractor 109 can have other processing tasks. To elaborate more on this, refer to
In what follows, it is to focus our discussions on the handling of a single fingerprint array.
Fingerprint Matching
In this section, it is to describe methods for the inverse of the fingerprinting process, i.e., to use the given fingerprint array to seek a match from within a different video content stream which may match partially or entirely the video content represented by the fingerprint.
There are several different scenarios between two pieces of video content from which the fingerprint is extracted. It is assumed video A and video B as the two content pieces to be matched through comparing the fingerprint data associated with the two video contents. If a match is determined to be true, then it concludes that original video contents A and B are identical at least for the sections associated with the matching fingerprint. This process can be illustrated in
Then video A and B may contain identical video content albeit they may be of different resolution, aspect ratio and possibly with different levels of quality degradations. For the purpose of discussions, it will not address these different scenarios. In stead, it will focus on how to seek a match between the fingerprints from the two video sequences.
Specific steps can be illustrated in
The SAD Operation
The SAD operation 700 is performed between the samples obtained from two neighboring video frames. Specifically, consider the example given in
SAD(A,B)=|A1−B1|+|A2−B2|+|A3−B3|+|A4−B4|+|A5−B5|
where the |A−B| is the absolute value operation.
The SAD operation basically evaluates the differences between the sample sets of the two video frames A and B. Larger value of SAD(A,B) implies bigger image content differences between the two video frames.
The Moving SAD Window and Sum of SAD (SSAD) Array
The SAD operation described above is repeated for two fingerprint arrays, one obtained from fingerprint A and the other obtained from the fingerprint B. The goal is to search through fingerprint B to see if there is a its subsection that matches fingerprint A. Consider
First, fingerprint A and B are item-wise associated with each other, because fingerprint A is smaller than fingerprint B in number of samples, only some of the samples from within fingerprint B are associated with those within fingerprint A.
Next all of the fingerprint B samples within this window are included in the SAD operations with fingerprint A samples and the results are added together to form a single sum of SAD (SSAD) number.
The same process is then repeated by shifting the position of fingerprint B relative to A by one frame, as shown as 104 and 114 in
The Fingerprint Match Detection
The fingerprint match detection is a process applied to the SSAD time-series of numbers and is shown in
The fingerprint match is identified by a very sharp drop in the SSAD values just before the match and a very sharp increase in SSAD values just after the match. This can be shown in an actually measured SSAD values in
The element to detect the sharp drop pattern within the SSAD values can be illustrated in
Clearly, S(n) represents the difference between video A and video B on their respective n-th frame within the fingerprint window. Note that for video fingerprint B, the index n refers to a different video frame each time the fingerprint array B is shifted by one frame relative to fingerprint array A.
The pattern values can be obtained by the pattern extractor 703, which is described as follows:
P(n)=(S(n)−S(n−1))/S(n)
Note that P(1) is not defined and will not be used. In addition, it does the above only if S(n) is not zero and a certain fixed threshold which will be discussed later in detail. Where the threshold value is chosen by the threshold estimator. Otherwise, P(n) is set to zero.
From this, it is noted that if P(n) is a positive number it means that S(n)>S(n−1), i.e., the SSAD value is increasing, it means that the two represented video frames are becoming more different from each other, indicating less probability that a match will be found. On the other hands, if P(n) is a negative number, it means that the two video frames are increasingly more similar to each other. The value of P(n) represents the percentage of the change of S(n), larger P(n) means more rapid change in values of S(n) vs. S(n−1).
The extracted pattern values form another series of numbers which are then stored in pattern store 704.
The pattern inspector 705 selects the values contained in pattern store 704 by the following steps:
Select a specific position, say, m, within the pattern store 704 and identify all of the values within a window of size 2M−1 of position m:
P(m−M+1),P(m−M+2), . . . ,P(m−1),P(m),P(m+1), . . . ,P(m+M−2),P(m+M−1)
These values are then added together by the pattern value collector 706 and yields a result C(m), in the following way:
C(m)=−P(m−M+1)− . . . −P(m−1)−P(m)+P(m+1)+ . . . +P(m+M−1)
The value of M is a constant which is chosen so that there are sufficient number of values of P to be included in the calculation of C within the sliding window of 2M−1. Preferably, the value of M is 15.
From the above, it is noted that C(m) will be a large number when there is a sharp dip in the values of pattern values P( . . . ) at position m. Otherwise, C(m) tends to be small values.
Finally, the value C(m) is compared with a user given threshold 707 to determine if a match has been found between the two fingerprints, and the frame number is determined through the above process and signaled as output to histogram collector 709.
The histogram collector 709 gathers all of the pattern values C(m) that have exceeded the given threshold 707, count the number of times each value exceeds the threshold 707, and store them into an array. Each item in the array holds the value m, C(m) and the number of times that C(m) has crossed the threshold 707. Finally, the maximum value selector 710 inspects all such values within the histogram for the value that has appeared the most number of times. This value refers to the frame that is identified as the fingerprint matched frame. The output of the maximum value selector 710 is then delivered to the formatter 17, which also takes information from the relative position 115 to determine on which frame position that a match has been identified.
The Threshold Estimator
The threshold estimator 707 in
When Fingerprint B is not Sufficiently Long
In the above discussions, it is assumed that video B has sufficiently more frames than video A, i.e., by at least 2M−1. In other words, array fingerprint B is longer than array fingerprint A by sufficient number of frames. This is generally required because the shifting operation between the two fingerprint arrays is part of the computation process.
The above assumption is not always true. For example, video B can have the same number of frames as video A. Assuming that fingerprint for video B has been registered into the fingerprint database, it can apply the following modification to the above described method. To see this, consider
Another alternative is to pad zero frames to either sides of video B, i.e., add more frames to either side of video B frames. These frames have zero sample values.
If video B is shorter than A, then the method must be applied with the roles of A and B reversed, and repeat or pad video A if necessary.
Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind | 371c Date |
---|---|---|---|---|
PCT/CN2008/071039 | 5/22/2008 | WO | 00 | 5/30/2008 |
Publishing Document | Publishing Date | Country | Kind |
---|---|---|---|
WO2009/140823 | 11/26/2009 | WO | A |
Number | Name | Date | Kind |
---|---|---|---|
5019899 | Boles et al. | May 1991 | A |
6037986 | Zhang et al. | Mar 2000 | A |
6473529 | Lin | Oct 2002 | B1 |
7336841 | Neogi | Feb 2008 | B2 |
20050141707 | Haitsma et al. | Jun 2005 | A1 |
20060129822 | Snijder et al. | Jun 2006 | A1 |
Number | Date | Country | |
---|---|---|---|
20100303366 A1 | Dec 2010 | US |