Audio-visual football video analysis, from structure detection to attention analysis

Sport video is an important video genre. Content-based sports video analysis attracts great interest from both industry and academic fields. A sports video is characterised by repetitive temporal structures, relatively plain contents, and strong spatio-temporal variations, such as quick camera switches and swift local motions. It is necessary to develop specific techniques for content-based sports video analysis to utilise these characteristics. For an efficient and effective sports video analysis system, there are three fundamental questions: (1) what are key stories for sports videos; (2) what incurs viewer’s interest; and (3) how to identify game highlights. This thesis is developed around these questions. We approached these questions from two different perspectives and in turn three research contributions are presented, namely, replay detection, attack temporal structure decomposition, and attention-based highlight identification. Replay segments convey the most important contents in sports videos. It is an efficient approach to collect game highlights by detecting replay segments. However, replay is an artefact of editing, which improves with advances in video editing tools. The composition of replay is complex, which includes logo transitions, slow motions, viewpoint switches and normal speed video clips. Since logo transition clips are pervasive in game collections of FIFA World Cup 2002, FIFA World Cup 2006 and UEFA Championship 2006, we take logo transition detection as an effective replacement of replay detection. A two-pass system was developed, including a five-layer adaboost classifier and a logo template matching throughout an entire video. The five-layer adaboost utilises shot duration, average game pitch ratio, average motion, sequential colour histogram and shot frequency between two neighbouring logo transitions, to filter out logo transition candidates. Subsequently, a logo template is constructed and employed to find all transition logo sequences. The precision and recall of this system in replay detection is 100% in a five-game evaluation collection. An attack structure is a team competition for a score. Hence, this structure is a conceptually fundamental unit of a football video as well as other sports videos. We review the literature of content-based temporal structures, such as play-break structure, and develop a three-step system for automatic attack structure decomposition. Four content-based shot classes, namely, play, focus, replay and break were identified by low level visual features. A four-state hidden Markov model was trained to simulate transition processes among these shot classes. Since attack structures are the longest repetitive temporal unit in a sports video, a suffix tree is proposed to find the longest repetitive substring in the label sequence of shot class transitions. These occurrences of this substring are regarded as a kernel of an attack hidden Markov process. Therefore, the decomposition of attack structure becomes a boundary likelihood comparison between two Markov chains. Highlights are what attract notice. Attention is a psychological measurement of “notice ”. A brief survey of attention psychological background, attention estimation from vision and auditory, and multiple modality attention fusion is presented. We propose two attention models for sports video analysis, namely, the role-based attention model and the multiresolution autoregressive framework. The role-based attention model is based on the perception structure during watching video. This model removes reflection bias among modality salient signals and combines these signals by reflectors. The multiresolution autoregressive framework (MAR) treats salient signals as a group of smooth random processes, which follow a similar trend but are filled with noise. This framework tries to estimate a noise-less signal from these coarse noisy observations by a multiple resolution analysis. Related algorithms are developed, such as event segmentation on a MAR tree and real time event detection. The experiment shows that these attention-based approach can find goal events at a high precision. Moreover, results of MAR-based highlight detection on the final game of FIFA 2002 and 2006 are highly similar to professionally labelled highlights by BBC and FIFA

Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen

Knowledge assisted data management and retrieval in multimedia database sistems

With the proliferation of multimedia data and ever-growing requests for multimedia applications, there is an increasing need for efficient and effective indexing, storage and retrieval of multimedia data, such as graphics, images, animation, video, audio and text. Due to the special characteristics of the multimedia data, the Multimedia Database management Systems (MMDBMSs) have emerged and attracted great research attention in recent years. Though much research effort has been devoted to this area, it is still far from maturity and there exist many open issues. In this dissertation, with the focus of addressing three of the essential challenges in developing the MMDBMS, namely, semantic gap, perception subjectivity and data organization, a systematic and integrated framework is proposed with video database and image database serving as the testbed. In particular, the framework addresses these challenges separately yet coherently from three main aspects of a MMDBMS: multimedia data representation, indexing and retrieval. In terms of multimedia data representation, the key to address the semantic gap issue is to intelligently and automatically model the mid-level representation and/or semi-semantic descriptors besides the extraction of the low-level media features. The data organization challenge is mainly addressed by the aspect of media indexing where various levels of indexing are required to support the diverse query requirements. In particular, the focus of this study is to facilitate the high-level video indexing by proposing a multimodal event mining framework associated with temporal knowledge discovery approaches. With respect to the perception subjectivity issue, advanced techniques are proposed to support users’ interaction and to effectively model users’ perception from the feedback at both the image-level and object-level