Recognizing offensive tactics in broadcast basketball videos via key player detection

We address offensive tactic recognition in broadcast basketball videos. As a crucial component towards basketball video content understanding, tactic recognition is quite challenging because it involves multiple independent players, each of which has respective spatial and temporal variations. Motivated by the observation that most intra-class variations are caused by non-key players, we present an approach that integrates key player detection into tactic recognition. To save the annotation cost, our approach can work on training data with only video-level tactic annotation, instead of key players labeling. Specifically, this task is formulated as an MIL (multiple instance learning) problem where a video is treated as a bag with its instances corresponding to subsets of the five players. We also propose a representation to encode the spatio-temporal interaction among multiple players. It turns out that our approach not only effectively recognizes the tactics but also precisely detects the key players.