Zeitera granted first three patents on ACR technology

SAN FRANCISCO, June 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- TV of Tomorrow Show, CA — Zeitera, the first-to-market, market leader in automated content recognition (ACR) managed services today announced that the U.S. Patent Office has granted it three new patents for its original work in automated content recognition (ACR) technology based on content fingerprinting. These patents address Zeitera's unique approach to its highly scalable, robust, and efficient video and audio fingerprinting technology platform named Vvid.

Since early 2007 Zeitera has been leveraging its core strengths in computer vision algorithm development and scalable backend search technology towards applications in broadcast and cable television and theatrical releases. Now that the market for ACR applications is rapidly emerging, these patents help Zeitera deliver massively-scalable, highly-efficient solutions for Smart TVs, Set Top Boxes, tablets, and smart phones. Zeitera is currently deploying the patented Vvid platform in the broadcast infrastructure of several major US broadcasters to enable Social TV broadcast enhancements with synchronized second screen applications.

These three patents, which are the first to issue of Zeitera's large portfolio of over 20 U.S. patent applications, establish a solid differentiation from other ACR and fingerprinting providers by addressing a tight integration between search algorithms and the client-based fingerprinting algorithms.

Dan Eakins, Zeitera's CEO said of these awards, "Since our founding, Zeitera's team has been committed to building the best technology possible and protecting it with numerous patents so that our customers and partners will be able to deploy ACR solutions with the assurance that they have both the best platform and the ability to use it in the marketplace with confidence."

The first U.S. Patent, #8,195,689, titled Media Fingerprinting and Identification System, describes Zeitera's overall fingerprinting architecture and search method for generating efficient groups of signatures used in identifying multimedia clips with audio or video samples.  The broad claims differentiate Zeitera's ACR fingerprinting system from numerous earlier competing systems that rely on much simpler search organization schemes and less robust signature types.  In addition, the basic search backend system can be leveraged for all the different types of Zeitera's audio and video signatures while still gaining the benefit inherent in the search space reduction techniques. The clustering scheme allows Zeitera to add to the database for live broadcast content without having to re-index the signatures already in the database.

The second, U.S. Patent, # 8,189,945, titled Digital Video Content Fingerprinting Based on Scale Invariant Interest Region Detection with an Array of Anisotropic Filters,describes a system for video fingerprint selection, generation, and detection that is robust to severe content changes from the original source material.  This is significant for both anti-piracy applications (where intentional distortions are often introduced to bypass traditional fingerprinting systems) and also for television and movie distribution (where delivered content is often distorted through intentional transformations including aspect ratio changes, scaling from HD to thumbnail sizes in picture-in-picture windows, and zooming on gaming consoles).  Zeitera's novelty includes finding many regions of interest in video frames and encoding the most relevant of these with sophisticated algorithms to generate many short compact signatures.  This scheme has been successfully deployed in some of the earliest ACR systems with Zeitera's first customers and is currently being used to locate millions of titles that are illegally uploaded on the internet.

The third, U.S. Patent, # 8,171,030, titled Method and Apparatus for Multi-Dimensional Content Search and Video Identification, describes systems and methods for selecting and searching video sequences and generating video fingerprints in a scalable fashion while reducing potential false positives through novel thresholding and classification techniques.

Thanks to Zeitera's large patent-pending portfolio and increasing deployments with US broadcasters and content owners, Zeitera is building a long-term position that will enable all types of next generation ACR deployments.

Vvid - Smart TV, Phone and Tablet ACR System
Vvid is an end-to-end audio and video fingerprinting system for the deployment of interactive TV content using ACR technology. It enables cost-effective content identification for consumer electronics devices with linear and time-shifted TV programs, commercials, and movies. The Vvid system is available in a variety of configurations for network broadcasters, programmers, distributors, and CE manufacturers. It can be deployed with audio and/or video fingerprinting and is supported by managed back-end search services or a direct technology licensing model. It is field-tested to provide accuracy and performance that scales to large databases and millions of active clients.

About Zeitera
Zeitera (www.zeitera.com) is a Silicon Valley start-up located in Mountain View, CA. Backed by experienced technology investors with successful track records in building technology companies, Zeitera leads the emerging market for (ACR) solutions across the broadcast, internet, and CE ecosystems. Zeitera has a senior team of computer vision, image processing, data-mining, and search experts with experience building large-scale systems at successful start-ups as well as established technology companies such as Sony, AOL, Google, IBM, Broadcom, and Nokia.

Contact:
Dan Eakins
Zeitera
[email protected], 650-208-0760

SOURCE Zeitera