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Smart Sports Video Technology
Raising the bar on televising sports
Introduction
Sport is a way of life in many countries all over the world; to the extent that some even treat it as a religion. As society advances, people look to sporting excellence both as a way of lifestyle, and also a means to fuel nationalistic ambitions. Taking Singapore as an example, it's not surprising to find stadiums packed to capacity crowd when a major sporting event hits town.
Advances in Television technology mean that while you may not be present to catch the game 'live', you still can catch all the action and excitement on television - in the privacy of your home. Sports spectatorship is now a global marketing phenomenon regularly sees big name enterprises connecting with the sports fraternity (e.g advertising, sponsorship). A case in point: NBC (owned by General Electric) just paid US$2.201 billion for the U.S. TV rights to the 2010 and 2012 Olympics.
Myriad of Technology
The explosive growth in televised sports is fueling technology that adds to the breadth of value-added services. Of course, this is all good news for the mainstream TV viewer who benefits from new, cutting-edge technology. Be it analog, digital TV, Hi-Definition, wired, wireless, set-top-box or PDA, Pervasive technology can transcode the original content into a form suitable for display on any viewing device. Immersive video technology, on the other hand, seeks to recreate the game action in such a way that the viewer feels he or she is right in the thick of the action. This can be achieved through simple multi-camera selection, or more sophisticated panoramic virtual view morphing. In Content Enhancement, the aim is to bring out the tangible 'euphoria' through eye-catching visual effects. Through the use of flashy pop-ups, the progress of the game is monitored and at selected significant moments, pop-ups can be introduced to the video. A common example is the score-time bar affixed at a corner of the screen. In Video Editorial, video footage captured during the game are automatically analysed and highlights extracted for half-time analysis or post-game talk-show discussions.
I²R
Technology
The way forward is clear: viewers will be spoilt for choice. What does this mean for broadcasters and content providers? For now, the general consensus is that they have to invest more in innovative technology to up the ante on viewers' experience. With this strategy, they hope that this will, in turn, drive up the viewers' appetite for even more and different sports programs (and especially for programs for which they are willing to pay). In the last decade, HDTV and DTV progress has been arguably impeded by the initial high cost and lack of consumer interest. Since then, lowering of cost, improvements in technology, standardization and smart marketing have all come together to fuel renewed interest in advanced TV. Anticipating this wave, the Media Semantics Department of I²R has been developing innovative sports content analysis technology, addressing the following areas of need:
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Real-time software-based MPEG-2 to MPEG-1 transcoder, suitable for PDAs or handphone |
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Virtual game reconstruction by smart video object segmentation and field homography. This is particularly useful for low bit-rate video on mobile devices |
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Automatic summarization of game, via an innovative framework of video shot identification and fusion with audio cues |
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Automatic detection of tennis/soccer highlights, already proven to work with robust results obtained over the largest such corpus in the world (50 hours of test-data). |
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Virtual Content Insertion (VCI) -- Automatic detection of lull moments in the game for virtual advertising. (patent-pending) |
Goal mouth appearances indicate potential exciting play
New virtual content inserted
In 2003, we presented 2 full papers at the prestigious ACM Multimedia conference, considered to be the pinnacle of multimedia technology advancement. In the same work year, we also won the Tan-Kah-Kee Silver Award for our work in VCI.
Creating
Impact
Buoyed by these recent successes, we continue to be committed to staying relevant and to creating impact for the industry. By identifying the needs of the end viewers, we have sharpened our niche to best deliver what viewers want. With the announcement of StarHub's migration to Digital Cable, the Digital story continues to bring forth the possibilities of interactivity and personalization closer to home. Here are some scenarios we envisage happening in the near future:
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As the live game is broadcast, replay-worthy snippets as defined by users are automatically generated and housed at the server head-end. These are then downloaded via the cable carousel to the local set-top-box (via subscription), and a small icon appears on the screen to indicate their availability. This means you can control what you want to replay. Replays are no longer subject to the decisions of broadcast directors! |
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Consumers who don't want to pay for "special services" can get their replay snippets free but blended with virtual advertising using our VCI technology. |
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When local set-top-boxes are fitted with a hard-disk (not yet, but a near-term reality), the time-codes of the replay snippets are delivered for local content indexing. This means that end-viewers can jump straight to the action sequences they want to view. |
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The replay snippets can also be disseminated on other channels such as a handphone, so that those unable to watch the live game can still watch it over these and similar devices. |
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Game-breaks are automatically detected, and sponsored interactive "quizzes" can pop out onto the screen. "Live" quizzes based on what has just happened (as opposed to pre-prepared ones) can be launched e.g., "which team had longer possession of the ball in the last 20 minutes? |
As it's easy to see, the possibilities are only limited by our imagination!
For
enquiries/explore collaboration, please contact:
Industry Development Department
Tel: 65 6874 8399
Fax: 65 6775 9923
Email: inddev@i2r.a-star.edu.sg
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