Patent ID: 8676030

Claim:
A method of automatically selecting an interactive activity to be presented to viewers of a video program, said interactive activity not being transmitted in time synchronization with said video program, said video program not embedded with interactive activity synchronization information to be used in said method, said method comprising: receiving video data from a video source, said video data being free from embedded interactive activity synchronization information to be used in said method; automatically identifying specific video object content in the received video data by using a processor to determine a plurality of features in said video data; at least some of said plurality of features being selected for their ability to persist when an image from said video data is rotated, presented with altered resolution, or presented with different lighting; abstracting said video data into a three dimensional structure of features comprising two spatial dimensions and one time dimension; determining the time order in which various feature groups appear; assigning at least some of said feature groups to objects; generating a video signal representing the video data; communicating the video signal to a display device, wherein the display device displays a video image representative of the video signal; monitoring user interaction with the displayed video image; and selecting an interactive activity based on the user's interaction with the displayed video image and based on the automatically identified object content in the video data.