Common visual cues for sports highlights detection

Automatic annotation of semantic events allows effective retrieval of video content. In this paper, we present automatic annotation of sports highlights for some of the principal sport types, obtained by detecting and tracking a limited number of visual cues common to each sports. Highlights are represented as atomic entities at the semantic level. They have a limited temporal extension and can be modeled as the spatio-temporal concatenation of specific events. Visual cues encode position and speed information coming from the camera and from the object/athletes that are present in the scene, and are estimated automatically from the video stream. Algorithms for model checking and for visual cues estimation are discussed, as well as applications of the representation to different sport domains.