Unsupervised soccer video abstraction based on pitch, dominant color and camera motion analysis

• Authors: F. Coldefy;P. Bouthemy
• Venue: Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia
• Year: 2004

We present a soccer video abstraction method based on the analysis of the audio and video streams. This method could be applied to other sports as rugby or american football. The main contribution of this paper is the design of an unsupervised summarization method, and more specifically, the introduction of an efficient detector of excited speech segments. An excited commentary is supposed to correspond to an interesting moment of the game. It is simultaneously characterized by an increase of the pitch (or fundamental frequency) within the voiced segments and an increase of the energy supported by the harmonics of the pitch. The pitch is estimated from the autocorrelation function and its local increases are detected from a multiresolution technique. We introduce a specific energy measure for the voiced segments. A statistical analysis of the energy measures is performed to detect the most excited parts of the speech. A deterministic combination of excited speech detection, dominant color identification and camera motion analysis is then performed in order to discriminate between excited speech sequences of the game and excited speech sequences in commercials or in studio shots included in the processed TV programs. The method presented here does not need any learning stage. It has been tested on seven soccer videos for a total duration of almost 20 hours.