The Excitement of Sports: Automatic Highlights Using Audio/Visual Cues

The production of sports highlight packages summarizing a game’s most exciting moments is an essential task for broadcast media. Yet, it requires labor-intensive video editing. We propose a novel approach for auto-curating sports highlights, and demonstrate it to create a first of a kind, real-world system for the editorial aid of golf and tennis highlight reels. Our method fuses information from the players’ reactions (action recognition such as high-fives and fist pumps), players’ expressions (aggressive, tense, smiling and neutral), spectators (crowd cheering), commentator (tone of the voice and word analysis) and game analytics to determine the most interesting moments of a game.