Simultaneous automated verification of conditional access system on multiple TV sets

Abstract

Conditional access system (CAS) is an essential part of Pay-TV systems, used to restrict access to certain content only to the users who subscribed to that content. Therefore it is useful to have automated verification of CAS system in integrated digital TV sets which contain the conditional access module. This paper presents a novel system for automated verification of CAS in multiple TV sets. The system supports simultaneous verification of 16 integrated digital TV sets produced by different manufacturers. The verification algorithm incorporates pop-up detection and optical character recognition in order to detect when each TV set sends the CAS message. Comparison with the reference image representing the expected response makes decision on the correctness of CAS functionality in the TV set. The system brings speed gain greater than 10 compared to the system which verifies one TV set at a time. © 2012 IEEE.