Supervision of video and audio content in digital TV broadcasts

Abstract: An automatic system for supervision of the video and audio content in digital TV broadcasts was investigated in this master’s thesis project. The main goal is to find the best and most cost effective solution for Teracom to verify that the broadcast TV content as received by remote receivers is the same as that incoming to Teracom from content providers. Different solutions to this problem will be presented. The report begins with some background information about the Swedish terrestrial digital TV network and the MPEG-2 compression standard used to transport audio and video; including a description of the DVB Systems and Transport Stream protocol. It describes two current techniques for the supervision of the audio and video content, including an evaluation of these techniques. The first solution is to monitor the video and audio content either by detecting common errors such as frozen picture, visible artifacts, or by comparing the content from two different sources, i.e. a comparison of the output and the input content. The later could be done using video fingerprinting. The second solution monitors the video and audio content indirectly by analyzing the Transport Stream. This could be done either by comparing two Transport Streams to verify that the broadcast signal is identical to the received signal or by detecting common errors in the streams. Further two new potential solutions will be presented based on the research utilizing background knowledge of the MPEG-2 compression standard. The thesis ends with a summary with conclusions and evaluations of all four solutions and future work.