A novel method for slow motion replay detection in broadcast basketball video

Slow motion replays are valuable for sports video analysis. Many methods for slow motion replay detection have been proposed, and they are classified into two categories. One assumes that a replay is sandwiched by a pair of visually similar special digital video effects, but the assumption is not always true in basketball videos. The other analyzes replay features to distinguish replay segments from non-replay segments. The results are not satisfactory since some features (e.g. dominant color of sports field) are not applicable for basketball. Most replay detectors focus on soccer videos. In this paper, we propose a novel idea to detect slow motion replays in basketball videos. The existence of scoreboard is referred to filter large amount of non-replay frames, this improves detection accuracy. After scoreboard frame filtering, every consecutive non-scoreboard frame sequence bounded by scoreboard frames are considered as a non-scoreboard segment. Characteristics of replays and non-replays are observed to create features, which can be used to detect replays and prune non-replays from non-scoreboard segments. Experimental results show that the proposed replay detection method is applicable for both kinds of basketball videos with/without TV commercials. As compared with previous researches for basketball videos, our method presents the superior performance.