Soccer video summarization based on cinematography and motion analysis

Abstract

Summarization of soccer videos has been widely studied due to its worldwide viewers and potential commercial applications. Most existing methods focus on searching for highlight events in soccer videos such as goals, penalty kicks and generating a summary as a list of such events. However, besides highlight events, scenes of intensive competition between players of two teams and emotional moments are also interesting. In this paper, we propose a soccer summarization system which is able to capture highlight events, scenes of intensive competition, and emotional moments. Based on the flow of soccer games, we organize a video summary as follows: first, scenes of intensive competition, second, what events happened, third, who were involved in the events, and finally how players or audience reacted to the events. With this structure, the generated summary is more complete and interesting because it provides both game play and emotional moments. Our system takes broadcast video as input, and divides it into multiple clips based on cinematographic features such as sport video production techniques, the transition of shots, and camera motions. Then, the system evaluates the interest level of each clip to generate a summary. Experimental results and subjective evaluation are carried out to evaluate the quality of the generated summary and the effectiveness of our proposed interest level measure.