Patent ID: 8176507

Claim:
An advertisement-section detecting apparatus to detect a peripheral section on the basis of broadcast-data which corresponds to a broadcasting program including a main section and a peripheral section including an advertisement section, and which includes caption data, the advertisement-section detecting apparatus comprising: a captioned-section acquisition unit configured to acquire a captioned section including a caption generated by the caption data, on the basis of a temporal position of the caption data; a non-captioned-section acquisition unit configured to acquire a pattern of non-captioned sections that do not include the caption, on the basis of the captioned section; a memory configured to store a broadcasting-program template, the broadcasting-program template being a template corresponding to a broadcasting-program format, the broadcasting-program format including a main-section format and a peripheral-section format, and the broadcasting-program template identifying a pattern of a non-captioned section format including the peripheral-section format; an identifying unit configured to compare a length of one of the non-captioned sections in the pattern of non-captioned sections acquired by the non-captioned-section acquisition unit with a length of a section of the non-captioned section format of the broadcasting-program template, and to identify, when the length of the one of the non-captioned sections in the pattern of non-captioned sections acquired by the non-captioned-section acquisition unit is greater than the length of the section of the non-captioned section format of the broadcasting-program template, the non-captioned section corresponding to the non-captioned section format; and a detector configured to detect a section corresponding to the peripheral-section format as the peripheral section, from the non-captioned section corresponding to the non-captioned section format.