An instant semantics acquisition system of live soccer video with application to live event alert and on-the-fly language selection

Abstract

Automatic indexing of recorded sports video is a hard problem, even more so for live sports video, though a lot of advances have been achieved in the recent years. This paper presents a semiautomatic instant semantics generation system of live soccer video and its two applications: live event alert and instant semantics embedding. A key technical challenge of building the proposed system is how to acquire the desired semantics in a very short time lag. To confront this challenge, we develop a threechannel approach to accurately and quickly acquire semantics. The three channels are (1) developing the tool for inputting gamelog, (2) signal communication for getting commands of referee and director, and (3) video analysis for finding event boundary. The proposed system requires only a very small amount of manual work to operate gamelog acquisition tool using an icon-based interface for entering event log. Experimental results show that our system can quickly obtain the semantics of live soccer video, alert live events with a very small latency, and embed semantics into broadcasting video with a short time lag. Copyright 2008 ACM.