Logo recognition in videos: an automated brand analysis system

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1228180 (Table of Contents)

Every year companies spend a sizeable budget on marketing, a large portion of which is spent on advertisement of their product brands on TV broadcasts. These physical advertising artifacts are usually emblazoned with the companies' name, logo, and their trademark brand. Given these astronomical numbers, companies are extremely keen to verify that their brand has the level of visibility they expect for such expenditure. In other words advertisers, in particular, like to verify that their contracts with broadcasters are fulfilled as promised since the price of a commercial depends primarily on the popularity of the show it interrupts or sponsors. Such verifications are essential to major companies in order to justify advertising budgets and ensure their brands achieve the desired level of visibility. Currently, the verification of brand visibility occurs manually by human annotators who view a broadcast and annotate every appearance of a companies' trademark in the broadcast. In this thesis a novel brand logo analysis system which uses shape-based matching and scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) based matching on graphics processing unit (GPU) is proposed developed and tested. The system is described for detection and retrieval of trademark logos appearing in commercial videos. A compact representation of trademark logos and video frame content based on global (shape-based) and local (scale invariant feature transform (SIFT)) feature points is proposed. These representations can be used to robustly detect, recognize, localize, and retrieve trademarks as they appear in a variety of different commercial video types. Classification of trademarks is performed by using shaped-based matching and matching a set of SIFT feature descriptors for each trademark instance against the set of SIFT features detected in each frame of the video. Our system can automatically recognize the logos in video frames in order to summarize the logo content of the broadcast with the detected size, position and score. The output of the system can be used to summarize or check the time and duration of commercial video blocks on broadcast or on a DVD. Experimental results are provided, along with an analysis of the processed frames. Results show that our proposed technique is efficient and effectively recognizes and classifies trademark logos.