Patent ID: 8635065
Filing Date: 2014-01-21
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
1. An apparatus for automatic extraction of important events in audio signals comprising: a signal input processing circuit configured to supply Electronic Program Guide signals, audio signals, and video signals that correspond to the audio signals; an audio signal fragmenting processing circuit configured to partition the audio signals supplied by the signal input processing circuit into audio fragments of a predetermined length and to allocate a sequence of one or more audio fragments to a respective audio window; a classifier database including important event classifying rules, where an important event classifying rule is provided for each different category of program, including a news category, a sports category, a movie category, and a document film category, included in the audio signals; a classifier selection processing circuit configured to identify the category of program, from among the news category, the sports category, the movie category, and the document film category, that the audio signals actually belong to using the Electronic Program Guide signals, and to choose a suitable important event classifying rule from the important event classifying rules stored in the classifier database based on the identified category of program, each of the news category, the sports category, the movie category, and the document film category having a different important event classifying rule; a feature extracting processing circuit configured to analyze acoustic characteristics of the audio signals included in the audio fragments, and to analyze acoustic characteristics of the audio signals comprised in the audio windows; and an important event extraction processing circuit configured to extract important events in audio signals supplied by the audio signal fragmenting processing circuit based on the identified category of program and the respective important event classifying rule chosen by the classifier selection processing circuit depending on the acoustic characteristics of the audio signals included in the audio fragments and on the acoustic characteristics of the audio signals included in the audio windows, each of the important events extracted by the important event extraction processing circuit includes a discrete sequence of cohesive audio fragments corresponding to an important event included in the audio signals.