Patent ID: 7962330

Claim:
An apparatus for automatic dissection, weighting and ranking of segmented audio signals, the apparatus comprising: a content detection means that is configured to receive a segmented audio signal, to automatically detect programs in the segmented audio signal and to automatically segment the programs into contents, the contents being important events comprised in the programs; a program weighting means for weighting each program comprised in the audio signal based on the contents of the respective program detected by the content detection means; a viewing statistic database comprising raw audio signals previously selected by a user and/or acoustic features extracted from audio signals previously selected by a user, wherein the program weighting means uses information stored in the viewing statistic database for weighting each program; a program ranking means for identifying programs of the same category and ranking the programs based on a weighting result for each program provided by the program weighting means; and a cross category ranking means for identifying weighted programs which belong to different categories, normalizing the weighted programs and ranking the normalized and weighted programs based on a normalization result, the normalization being performed by the cross category ranking means according to the following formula: Normalized_Ranking_Score1( c,i )=function( W (1) I (1)/ F ( c ,1)+ W (2) I (2)/ F ( c ,2)+ . . . + W ( N ) I ( N )/ F ( c,N )), with 1, 2, . . . , N being an index identifying the contents of a respective program, W(N) being a weighting vector comprising weighting factors for the contents 1 to N, I(N) being a content vector comprising the distribution of contents 1-N in the respective program, c being a category index, i being a program index in category c, and F(c,N) being a normalization factor corresponding to content N in category c, wherein the normalization factor F(c,N) is defined as the average duration or occurrence of content N for programs of category c.