System and method for measuring similarity between a set of known temporal media segments and a one or more temporal media streams

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION This system for measuring similarity between a set of known temporal media segments (reference streams) and one or more target media streams, or segments of target media streams, has two distinct aspects.
The first aspect is called the index generation phase which builds representations of the reference temporal media streams, the second phase is called the recognition phase, where instances of the known segments in the target stream are recognized.
The index generation phase is an off-line process that involves processing of the reference clips that are to be detected to generate representations of the clips in the form of the segment index table by extracting features.
The recognition phase recognizes known media segments in the input target stream by processing the input stream to extract features and using the segment index table.
In FIG.
1A a block diagram of a preferred indexing system 100 is shown.
Diagram 100 shows the system that implements the indexing phase.
Digital data storage 110 contains the set S=s.
sub.
1, .
.
.
, s.
sub.
n, of n reference media segments which is input 115 to computer 120.
The segment index computation algorithm 130 running on computing system 120 determines the indices for each of the reference media segments s.
sub.
i, i=1, .
.
.
, n.
These indices, in turn, are stored 135 in a segment index table, e.
g.
, stored on computer disk 140 (or other memory) and can be used in the recognition/detection phase.
In FIG.
1B, a preferred recognition (detection) system 150 is shown.
System 100 of FIG.
1A and system 150 of FIG.
1B embody some main aspects of the present invention.
The detection system (recognition phase system) 150 takes as input one or more temporal digital target media sources M 160 stored on media source 190.
Computer disk 140 contains segment index tables for various sets of reference media segments.
Here the media could, for example, be digital video comprising an audio track and a visual track or a digital audio and video stream generated from an analog source using a frame grabber hardware