Electronic Program Guide for RF Fed TV Channels

Abstract

Electronic Program Guide (EPG) is a feature where the program schedule of the channel is shown as a blended text over the video of the channel user is viewing. In case of STB the hardware is aware of which channel it is tuned to and so its possible to show EPG information easily. But in India where, still 93% of total TV viewers are watching TV from Radio Frequency fed cable, it becomes a challenge to provide EPG, this is because the service providers do not telecast a particular channel in a particular frequency. So in such a scenario, it is not possible to provide EPG easily. In this paper authors have proposed a system that facilitates showing EPG information even in case of RF fed TV. This works by recognizing the channel by identifying the logo of the channel. After the channel is identified, the EPG is obtained by looking up the URL of the particular channel. The EPG is obtained from the URL. The EPG is finally rendered on the video of the channel. The system is developed on a DSP platform that can recognize the channel within a delay of 2 seconds after changing the channel. The system works with 100% accuracy for the channels whose channel logos never disappear from the video. The system cannot work when there is no channel logo in the video which sometimes happen in India when advertisements are shown.