Goal event detection in broadcast soccer videos by combining heuristic rules with unsupervised fuzzy c-means algorithm

Event detection is essential for sports video summarization, indexing and retrieval. In this paper, based on three generally defined shot types, goal events are detected by combining heuristic rules with unsupervised fuzzy c-means algorithm. First heuristic rule based primary selection/filtering for potential goals is carried out in the shot layer which composed of three generally defined shot types, together with the number of frames within each shot is recorded as representative feature. Then to further classify goal events from other potential goals unsupervised fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm is adopted. The main contribution of this work is the combination of heuristic rule which is based on three generally defined shot types with unsupervised fuzzy c-means algorithm. And when defuzzified with prior knowledge of the number of goals within each match, accurate and robust results can be achieved over five half matches from different series produced by different broadcast stations.