Methods and apparatus for indirect illumination in electronic media rating systems
AssigneeThe Nielsen Company (US), LLC
InventorsJohn William Buonasera, Christen Voss Nielsen, Venugopal Srinivasan
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Abstract
Methods and apparatus for indirect illumination in electronic media rating systems are disclosed. A disclosed example method to detect an audience member includes reflecting non-visible light off of a room surface to indirectly illuminate a first portion of the room, receiving reflections of the indirect illumination, processing the received reflections to determine whether an audience member is present in the illuminated portion of the room, and when the audience member is not detected, adjusting a source of the non-visible light to illuminate a second portion of the room.
Claims19
A method to detect an audience member, the method comprising:
- reflecting non-visible light off of a room surface to indirectly illuminate a first portion of a room;
- receiving reflections of the indirect illumination;
- processing the received reflections to determine whether an audience member is present in the illuminated portion of the room;
- and
- when the audience member is not detected, adjusting a source of the non-visible light to illuminate a second portion of the room.
An electronic media rating system comprising:
- a light source to reflect non-humanly visible light off of a room surface to provide indirect illumination of a portion of a room;
- and
- an audience image detection system to process received reflections of the indirect illumination to determine whether an audience member is present in the illuminated portion of the room, and when the audience member is not detected, adjusting an angle of the light source.
An article of manufacture comprising a tangible computer-readable storage medium storing machine-readable instructions that, when executed, cause a processor to:
- reflect non-visible light off of a room surface to indirectly illuminate a first portion of a room;
- receive reflections of the indirect illumination;
- process the received reflections to determine whether an audience member is present in the first portion of the room;
- and
- when the audience member is not detected, adjust a source of the non-visible light to a illuminate a second portion of the room different than the first portion.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.