Automatic Functionality Verification of Hybrid Set-Top Boxes With Dynamic User Interface

Abstract

Modern set-top-box (STB) user interfaces (UI) contain increased amount of animations/effects compared to standard UIs, thus demanding a new approach for accurate and cost-efficient STB functionality verification. In this paper, a fully automated system for functional failure detection in hybrid STBs with dynamic UI is proposed. It consists of image capturing unit, testing tool, and hybrid STB being verified. The automatic verification of hybrid STB functionality is performed by comparing the captured image of the dynamic UI to the referent image captured from referent STB. The system incorporates a new algorithm for image similarity measurement, adjusted for image alterations which often appear in dynamic UIs. Algorithm utilizes image feature extraction and comparison to determine captured and referent image similarity and to make decision regarding STB functionality. The proposed system was compared with existing fully automated system for functionality verification of an STB device with static UI. Tests were performed on both computer generated and live stream cases. For this purpose a new freely available computer generated image alterations database is created. The results show that the proposed system achieves higher performance and robustness, in terms of measuring image similarity despite alterations caused by dynamic UI effects.