Patent ID: 8634699

Claim:
An information signal processing method, comprising the steps of: detecting a predetermined voice feature of a vocal signal from an information signal of a recording having a recording time; obtaining image feature data indicative of at least one feature within an image signal of the information signal; identifying (i) one or more voice segments of the vocal signal based on the voice feature data and (ii) one or more image segments of the image signal based on the image feature data; dividing the signal into playback units each having a predetermined temporal length based on a predetermined comparison between the image and voice segments and a predetermined threshold; determining a meaning of each playback unit by utilizing both the voice signal and the image signal, the determining comprising: identifying a plurality of candidate meanings for each playback unit, the candidate meanings comprising corresponding candidate voice and image characteristics; determining, for the candidate meanings, values for the candidate voice and image characteristics based on the voice and image feature data; computing, for the candidate meanings of each playback unit, sums of corresponding ones of the candidate voice and image characteristic values; and for each playback unit, establishing the candidate meaning associated with a maximum sum as the corresponding meaning; calculating an evaluation value for each playback unit utilizing both the voice signal and the image signal, wherein different predetermined weighting factors are used to calculate the evaluation value for different predetermined broadcast programs; generating a summary playback list having a user-selected summary playback time that is less than the recording time; selecting playback units having the largest evaluation values for the summary playback list; and arranging the selected playback units to playback sequentially based on the time position of the playback units in the recording.