Pyramidwise structuring for soccer highlight extraction

Fast browsing video contents not only is an important research issue, but also has a variety of potential applications, especially for sports videos. In this paper, we propose a practical solution to extract highlights from soccer videos, which is based on the structure analysis of broadcast soccer video. First, the broadcast soccer video is structured into a soccer pyramid. Then, soccer highlights can be extracted in a flexible manner by using such a soccer pyramid structure. Besides, in order to obtain soccer pyramid, a condensation approach to soccer video and the corresponding structure extraction methods are also proposed. Experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness, efficiency and robustness of the proposed approaches to soccer video structuring and highlight extraction.