Automatic extraction of soccer video highlights using a combination of motion and audio features

We present a technique for rapidly generating highlights of soccer videos using peaks in audio volume in conjunction with temporal patterns of motion activity extracted in the compressed domain. Our intuition is that any interesting event, such as a goal, in a soccer match leads to an interruption of the game for a non-trivial duration. Furthermore, interesting events are associated with a sharp increase (or peak) in audio volume since the crowd noise goes up in anticipation of the event or as a result of the event. We thus use the temporal patterns of motion activity around each audio peak to detect and capture interesting events. Our preliminary results indicate that the scheme works well for a variety of soccer content from different parts of the world. The computational simplicity of our scheme enables rapid and flexible generation of highlights.