A Statistical-driven Approach for Automatic Classification of Events in AFL Video Highlights

Due to the repetitive and lengthy nature, automatic content-based summarization is essential to extract a more compact and interesting representation of sport video. State-of-the art approaches have confirmed that high-level semantic in sport video can be detected based on the occurrences of specific audio and visual features (also known as cinematic). However, most of them still rely heavily on manual investigation to construct the algorithms for highlight detection. Thus, the primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the statistics of cinematic features within play-break sequences can be used to less-subjectively construct highlight classification rules. To verify the effectiveness of our algorithms, we will present some experimental results using six AFL (Australian Football League) matches from different broadcasters. At this stage, we have successfully classified each play-break sequence into: goal, behind, mark, tackle, and non-highlight. These events are chosen since they are commonly used for broadcasted AFL highlights. The proposed algorithms have also been tested successfully with soccer video.