ScreenDetector
Jimmy BERNARD | 24 February 2014As a Pre-Sales engineer, I don’t really have the occasion to go as close as we would like into technical topics. This is why when I see the need in a specific tool that can help the company to work more efficiently, I like to it develops from A to Z. This is also a good way not to lose my developing skills and also a more interesting way to perform technology surveillance.
As a company working on the Digital Television, we are often facing some issues from the field that occur after several hours of watching the TV. So far we did not have any tool to monitor, analyze what was going on the TV during a duration test. The only way was to watch the TV…
From this assessment, I decided to implement a tool that would analyze the TV picture with a webcam in a “clever” way to report any interesting event that occurred during a night test. I already worked on a project that involved recovering the buffer of a WebCam formerly and decided to start from this piece of code written in JAVA using JMF (Java Media Framework).
The SW enables to catch different kinds of events like a black screen, a special kind of message displayed on the TV or the lack of motion. Each event comes with set of parameters the user may customize. For instance in the case of a duration zapping test, each zapping involves a 5 seconds transition that can disturb the black screen detection. This is why you can parameter the detection so it is not trigger if the black screen was not at least 7 seconds long. Each time an event is triggered, the SW takes a snapshot.
