Automatically generating a summary of sports video poses the challenge of detecting interesting moments, or highlights, of a game. Traditional sports video summarization methods leverage editing conventions of broadcast sports video that facilitate the extraction of high-level semantics. However, user-generated videos are not edited, and thus traditional methods are not suitable to generate a summary. In order to solve this problem, this work proposes a novel video summarization method that uses players' actions as a cue to determine the highlights of the original video. A deep neural network-based approach is used to extract two types of action-related features and to classify video segments into interesting or uninteresting parts. The proposed method can be applied to any sports in which games consist of a succession of actions. Especially, this work considers the case of Kendo (Japanese fencing) as an example of a sport to evaluate the proposed method. The method is trained using Kendo videos with ground truth labels that indicate the video highlights. The labels are provided by annotators possessing different experience with respect to Kendo to demonstrate how the proposed method adapts to different needs. The performance of the proposed method is compared with several combinations of different features, and the results show that it outperforms previous summarization methods.
Non-annotated video is more common than ever and this fact leads to an emerging field called video summarization. Key frame selection using motion analysis can greatly increase the understanding of the video content by presenting a series of frames summarizing the intended video. In this paper, we present an automatic video summarization technique based on motion analysis. The proposed technique defines motion metrics estimated from two optical flow algorithms, each using two different key frame selection criteria. We conducted a subjective user study to evaluate the performance of the motion metrics. The summarization process is threshold free and experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the method. An entropy-based criterion is proposed to characterize the pattern and intensity of object motion in a video sequence as a function of time. By applying a homoscedastic error model-based time series change point detection algorithm to this motion entropy curve, one is able to segment the corresponding video sequence into individual sections, each consisting of a semantically relevant event. The proposed method is tested on six hours of sports videos including basketball, soccer, and tennis. Excellent experimental results are observed.