Using Minute-by-Minute Match Report for Semantic Event Annotation in Soccer Video

In this work, we propose a soccer video annotation approach based on semantic matching with coarse time constraint, where video event and external text information - match report are synchronized by their semantic correspondence along the temporal sequences. Different from the state of the art soccer video analysis methods which assume that the time of event occurrence is given precisely in second, this work solves the problem that how to annotate the soccer video using the match report with coarse gained time information. Compared with previous approaches, the contributions of our approach include the following. 1) The approach synchronizes the video content and text description by their high-level semantics with coarse time constraint instead of the exact timestamp. In fact, most of the text descriptions from the famous sport websites provide the coarse time information in minutes rather than seconds. Therefore, we argue that our approach is more generalized. 2) We propose an attack-defense transition analysis (ADTA) based soccer video event boundary detection method. The previous methods give coarse boundaries which could be refined, or simply give the clips with fixed duration which may cause larger bias. The results of our method are more in line with the development process of soccer events. 3) Different with the existing audio features analysis based whistle detection method, we propose a novel Hough transformation based whistle detection algorithm from the perspective of image processing, which facilitates the game start time detection combing with the ellipse detection algorithm, and further helps the synchronization of video and text events. The experimental results conducted on large amount of soccer videos validated the effectiveness of our proposed approach.