A general framework for sports video summarization with its application to soccer

We propose a general framework for indexing and summarizing sports broadcast programs and its specific application to soccer. The framework is based on a high-level model of sports broadcast video using the concept of an event, defined according to domain-specific knowledge for different types of sports. Thus it covers most sports including those that have the action-and-stop pattern (e.g., baseball) and those containing continuous actions (e.g., soccer). In particular, within this general framework, using soccer as an example, we propose a novel approach to automatic event detection, which is based on automatic analysis of the visual and aural signals in the media. An MPEG-7 compliant prototype browsing system has been implemented to demonstrate the results.