An intelligent strategy for the automatic detection of highlights in tennis video recordings

Professional sport is a vital part of many peoples’ lives and sport is a multi billion industry in its own right. Professional coaches, sporting professionals and sports journalists often use video recordings of sporting events as a tool in their daily work. With the rapid growth of sport video recordings, there is an emerging demand for a sophisticated sports content-based video indexing systems. Video recordings of sporting event broadcasts often last several hours including commercial breaks. It is therefore time-consuming and difficult to locate key segments containing highlights. This study proposes the use of computational intelligence strategies and information from both the audio and video domains to automatically locate sporting highlight on personal video playback devices. Tennis is chosen as the target domain but the strategy should generalize to other sports as well. Experimental results show that both the mean precision and recall rates are higher than 89%, hence, the proposed approach is capable of effectively detecting tennis highlights in sports broadcasts.