FORM – 2

THE PATENTS ACT, 1970

(39 of 1970)

&

THE PATENTS RULES, 2003

PROVISIONAL SPECIFICATION
(See section 10 and rule 13)

SYSTEM FOR CHANNEL LOGO DETECTION BASED TV

AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT & REAL TIME ANALYTICS

TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES LIMITED,

an Indian Company of
Nirmal Building, 9th Floor,
Nariman Point, Mumbai – 21,
Maharashtra, India.
The following specification particularly describes the nature of the invention.
FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications.

Particularly, the present invention relates to TV Audience Measurement &
Analytic System using the HIP [Ref. Of HIP patent] device as sensor

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Related works from TCS are:
1. HIP ( Application number : 1028/MUM/2008, PCT application :
PCT/IN2009/000281, “"Methods and systems for wireless and wired
transmission" )
2. Channel Logo detection based EPG ( application number :
2036/mum/2009 , “System for obtaining information about TV
broadcasts via a plurality of channels”)
Therefore, there is a need for a system for monitoring audience behavior
using TV channel information which can:
 Produce charts, trending, aggregations in real time;
 Provide results with increased accuracy so that it can overcome the
limitations of existing systems which are based on frequency
monitoring and are considerably less accurate since frequency of
transmission in cable TV networks are changed arbitrarily from time
to time by local cable TV operator
 Provide data from larger sample size all over the geography
 Reduce the possibility of data tampering by vested parties

OBJECTS OF THE INVENTION

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It is an object of the present invention to provide a system where the TV
audience measurement can be done in real time using channel logo detection
image processing techniques
It is another object of the present invention to provide a system where the
analytic on the audience data can be performed in real time
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a system to
provide charts, trending, aggregations on audience data in real time

It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a system that can
perform Multi dimension analysis in real time

It is another object of the present invention to provide a system to serve

queries on live sensor streams on audience characteristics

It is another object of the present invention to provide a system to identify

the trends and “heat maps” of viewership data on Geographical Maps

It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a system to

monitor and analysis of advertisement viewership

It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a system for real
time competitor analysis for the TV channels

It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a system to search

for the related information from past events stored in the database

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SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Overview of the system is like
The basic working principle of this measurement system would be as
follows –
 HIP set top boxes detects logos of channels being viewed when
channel is changed by the viewer
 Hip box transmits the detected channel id, current time stamp ,
subscriber id and /or IP address of the HIP box to as internet hosted
analytics server using secure channels
 Geographic location is obtained using IP address
 Electronic Program Guide is obtained from internet sources
 Analytic server analyzes the data “In stream” and creates interactive
dashboards, mashups, heat maps, real time trending and charts
 Data from analytic server is available to authorized clients using a
internet connection and browser

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE ACCOMPANYING DRAWINGS

The invention will now be described with reference to the accompanying
drawing, in which:
Figure 1 below illustrates the deployment diagram of the measurement
system.

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Figure 1: Deployment Diagram
Figure 2 below illustrates the major block diagrams of the measurement
system.

Figure 2: Block Diagram

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

The invention is described in terms of the building blocks as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

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HIP Box (101 is the basic sensor used in the invention. It is described in disclosure (Patent
Application No: 1028/MUM/2008). The HIP box has the capability to detect the channel ID the
viewer is watching based on the displayed channel logo. This capability is based on advanced
image processing techniques and pattern recognition. The HIP Box receives AV input signals
from a variety of sources such as DTH, Cable and RF tuner boxes and gives an AV out signal to
the TV set (102)

The HIP box consists of two major modules – the Logo Detection Module (201) and the Message
Creation Module (202). The Logo Detection Module can detect the channel being viewed on the
TV set by matching the screen image with stored logo templates. The Message Creation Module
creates message packets consisting of Channel Id, Time Stamp and other information such as IP
addresses / User Id etc. and sends the message using secure channels to the Analytics and Data
Stream management Server (105).

The Analytics and Data Stream Management Server is exposed to the Internet and it collects the
data from all connected HIP Boxes. It consists of an Analytics Server application (203) that
captures, filters, aggregates and stores the message streams from HIP boxes. It has the
capability of supporting queries, drill downs, OLAP and statistical analysis. It can also perform
Mashups of this data using Geographical location information obtained using the IP addresses.
It can also combine the message stream data with Electronic Program Guide obtained via Web
Services. The Analytics Server makes use of a Data Base management System (106) to store and
access historical data.

A Web Server (204) serves various web based clients (104) with the analytics and reports as
created by the Analytics Server.