Browsing Sport Content through an Interactive H.264 Streaming Session

Abstract

This paper builds on an interactive streaming architecture that supports both user feedback interpretation, and temporal juxtaposition of multiple video bitstreams in a single streaming session. As an original contribution, these functionalities can be exploited to offer improved viewing experience, when accessing football content through individual and potentially bandwidth constrained connections. Starting from a conventional broadcasted content, our system automatically splits the native content into non-overlapping and semantically consistent segments. Each segment is then divided into shots, based on conventional view boundary detection. Shots are finally splitted in small clips. These clips support our browsing capabilities during the whole playback in a temporally consistent way. Multiple versions are automatically created to render each clip. Versioning depends on the view type of the initial shot, and typically corresponds to the generation of zoomed in and spatially or temporally subsampled video streams. Clips are encoded independently so that the server can decide on the fly the version to send as a function of the semantic relevance of the segments (in a user-transparent basis, as inferred from video analysis or metadata) and the interactive user requests. Replaying certain game actions is also offered upon request. The streaming is automatically switched to the requested event. Later, the playback is resumed without any offset. The capabilities of our system rely on the H.264/AVC standard. We use soccer videos to validate our framework in subjective experiments showing the feasibility and relevance of our system.