We present a parameterized approach to produce personalized variable length summaries of soccer matches. Our approach is based on temporally segmenting the soccer video into 'plays', associating a user-specifiable 'utility' for each type of play and using 'bin-packing' to select a subset of the plays that add up to the desired length while maximizing the overall utility (volume in bin-packing terms). Our approach systematically allows a user to override the default weights assigned to each type of play with individual preferences and thus see a highly personalized variable length summarization of soccer matches. We demonstrate our approach based on the output of an end-to-end pipeline that we are building to produce such summaries. Though aspects of the overall end-to-end pipeline are human assisted at present, the results clearly show that the proposed approach is capable of producing semantically meaningful and compelling summaries. Besides the obvious use of producing summaries of superior league matches for news broadcasts, we anticipate our work to promote greater awareness of the local matches and junior leagues by producing consumable summaries of them.
Sports video summarization in general has seen considerable traction in recent times -- player and ball motion tracking @cite_6 , highlight generation using audio visual cues @cite_19 @cite_1 etc. are being actively pursued in constrained settings. A recent and an interesting approach to generate basketball highlights @cite_21 leverages multimodal context cues for video summarization. While the system asserts good results in indoor basketball settings, replicating same to the outdoor settings would be a challenge in the absence of high quality broadcast data complemented with player and play-by-play stats. Local soccer matches or junior leagues are devoid of such elaborate setups and we only have video data in such settings. We thus propose a generic parameterized approach based on visual motion' cues to generate highlights of the soccer matches.
@cite_19 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_6
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We propose a fully automatic and computationally efficient framework for analysis and summarization of soccer videos using cinematic and object-based features. The proposed framework includes some novel low-level processing algorithms, such as dominant color region detection, robust shot boundary detection, and shot classification, as well as some higher-level algorithms for goal detection, referee detection, and penalty-box detection. The system can output three types of summaries: i) all slow-motion segments in a game; ii) all goals in a game; iii) slow-motion segments classified according to object-based features. The first two types of summaries are based on cinematic features only for speedy processing, while the summaries of the last type contain higher-level semantics. The proposed framework is efficient, effective, and robust. It is efficient in the sense that there is no need to compute object-based features when cinematic features are sufficient for the detection of certain events, e.g., goals in soccer. It is effective in the sense that the framework can also employ object-based features when needed to increase accuracy (at the expense of more computation). The efficiency, effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed framework are demonstrated over a large data set, consisting of more than 13 hours of soccer video, captured in different countries and under different conditions. Summarization is an essential requirement for achieving a more compact and interesting representation of sports video contents. We propose a framework that integrates highlights into play segments and reveal why we should still retain breaks. Experimental results show that fast detections of whistle sounds, crowd excitement, and text boxes can complement existing techniques for play-breaks and highlights localization. The massive growth of sports videos has resulted in a need for automatic generation of sports highlights that are comparable in quality to the hand-edited highlights produced by broadcasters such as ESPN. Unlike previous works that mostly use audio-visual cues derived from the video, we propose an approach that additionally leverages contextual cues derived from the environment that the game is being played in. The contextual cues provide information about the excitement levels in the game, which can be ranked and selected to automatically produce high-quality basketball highlights. We introduce a new dataset of 25 NCAA games along with their play-by-play stats and the ground-truth excitement data for each basket. We explore the informativeness of five different cues derived from the video and from the environment through user studies. Our experiments show that for our study participants, the highlights produced by our system are comparable to the ones produced by ESPN for the same games. Sports highlight generation techniques aim at condensing a full-length video to a significantly shortened version that still preserves the main interesting content of the original video. In this paper, we present the system for automatically generating the highlights from sports TV broadcasts. The proposed system detects exciting clips based on audio features and then classify the individual scenes within the clip into events such as replay, player, referee, spectator, and players gathering. A probabilistic Bayesian belief network based on observed events is used to assign semantic concept-labels to the exciting clips, such as goals, saves, yellow-cards, red-cards, and kicks in soccer video sequences. The labeled clips are selected according to their degree of importance to include in the highlights. We have successfully generated highlights from soccer video sequences.