Over-The-Air TV Detection Using Mobile Devices
Mohamed M. Ibrahim, Marco Gruteser, Khaled A. Harras, Moustafa A. Youssef · 2017
We introduce a mobile sensing technique to detect a nearby active television, the channel it is tuned to, and whether it is receiving this channel over the air or not. This technique can find applications in tracking TV viewership, second screen services and advertising, as well as improving the efficiency of TV white space spectrum usage. The technique uses a three-stage detection process: It first uses a Gaussian mixture model on audio recordings from mobile phones to detect likely TV sounds in the area. It then correlates the recording with known TV channel audio to identify the channel and improve detection robustness. Finally, it applies a latency analysis to determine whether programming is received over-the-air or through alternate means such as cable or satellite TV. Our system is evaluated using diverse datasets that take into account different realistic scenarios of indoor environments for several users. The results show that the system can achieve an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.9979 and a false negative rate of 0.0132.