Patent ID: 6845213

Claim:
Method for detecting and identifying time-constant patterns in video signals of any video source, particularly for the detection of advertising spots in television broadcastings or the like transmissions, by video signal analysis and determination of video signals, like emblems, being specific for the respective telestation, characterized by the following steps: (a) after testing the activity of the video source at least one determined picture section is read-in into a storage in digitized form as brightness matrix; (b) the border courses of the actual picture section are determined in the form a directional field from the brightness matrix read-in before and are stored as directional field matrix; (c) by comparison of the directional field matrixes of subsequently read-in pictures of the same picture section with the stored directional field matrix the time-constant portions of the directional field are determined; (d) if a sufficient time-constant pattern could not be identified the method steps (a) to (c), in the following called reference measurement, are repeated with respect to a new picture section; (e) the time-constant portions of the directional field determined after the end of a certain number of comparison measurements are stored for reference as modified directional field matrix and are used for further comparison measurements; (f) by comparison of the directional field matrixes of subsequent pictures of the same picture section with the directional field matrix stored as reference the further presence or absence of the time-constant pattern is derived by means of statistical methods.