Grant: Idea to Innovation

The objective is to leverage the TV and Radio advertisement detection technology developed at CRIM to develop prototypes for advertisement detection products and services. These products and services have a very wide applicability. For example, they can be used by TV stations for monitoring ads and for indexing broadcasts, by CRTC for monitoring compliance of ads, by advertisement companies and other businesses for monitoring the airing of their ads on TV and radio broadcasts. We have developed advertisement detection system that accurately monitors specific ads using audio only. It can also detect arbitrary ads with over 96% recall and over 92% precision. The same algorithms can be used to detect copying of copyrighted audio (songs etc.) in peer-to-peer transfer over the internet. Currently, this technology works off-line on recorded audio of the broadcasts. The algorithms are completely automated, and can be applied to both TV and radio broadcasts. We need to test the algorithms on much larger data from all over US and Canada to verify the performance. We will also optimize the computing speed of the algorithms for searching both known ads and new ads. The algorithms that find new ads are novel, but we need to show that they perform well for all kinds of programs with reasonable computing requirements. Evaluating the robustness of the algorithms on data from all over North America is necessary in order to attract funding for technology transfer from potential companies in this business.