Replay Detection In Sports Video Sequences

In many sports, the majority of highlights are confined to relatively short durations of intense action. In some sense these segments capture the essence of a game and summarize the moments of important action. Automatic detection of these highlights could provide an important browsing mechanism in a video library of sports games. In this paper, we present efficient algorithms, operating in the MPEG; domain, for detecting two kinds of replay from sports video sequences. These replays often correspond to highlights in a game and can be used as indices of a sports video. The first algorithm detects exact replays while the second algorithm detects slow motion replays. Both algorithms operate directly on MPEG-1/MPEG-2 video data and thus they are very efficient because the expensive decoding operation is unnecessary. Experimental results on several video sequences show that the proposed algorithms are effective in detecting replays in most sports video sequences.