Design of Color-Code System for Time-Stamping Broadcast Video

For the purpose of video indexing and monitoring for broadcast TV streams, it is needed to associate any frame of a broadcast stream with its current broadcasting time. In this paper, we propose a new time-stamping method to accurately associate any frame of a broadcast stream with its corresponding broadcasting time by stamping a structured color-code visually representing current broadcasting time on each frame of a broadcast stream. The experimental results show that a structured color-code with brightness calibration can be perfectly recognized in real-time. They also demonstrate the robustness of the structured color-code by implementing a real-time video indexing system that can generate metadata containing segmentation information described by broadcasting time. TV viewers can interactively view broadcast streams recorded in their set-top boxes with the corresponding metadata delivered.