A Friendly Location-Aware System to Facilitate the Work of Technical Directors when Broadcasting Sport Events

Abstract

The production costs of broadcasting sport events that require tracking moving objects are continuously increasing. Although those events are very demanded by the audience, broadcasting organizations have economical difficulties to afford them. For that reason, they are demanding the development of new professional (software and hardware) equipments that lead to a considerable reduction of the production costs.

Real-time selection of video streams for live TV broadcasting based on Query-by-Example using a 3D model

“…Some of the proposed solutions imply the use of keywords (e.g., one of the interaction modes proposed in [19]) or a query language (e.g., [2]) to retrieve the relevant images, whereas others consider a visual input to retrieve similar images. Keyword-based interfaces for image retrieval involve several difficulties, such as the selection of appropriate keywords by the user, semantic issues (e.g., there may be several possible meanings for a given keyword, synonyms for the input keywords, etc.…”

“…For example, the TD in charge of the live broadcasting of a car race could be interested, at the last lap of the race, in a shot that shows the cars fighting for the first position. A system to provide automatically the TD with the cameras that are obtaining these interesting shots (as in [1,2,3,4]), would be very useful for broadcasting corporations. However, a challenge for this kind of systems is how to obtain a precise definition of what an interesting shot for the TD is, to query the available cameras in order to retrieve those that can provide a similar shot.…”

“…Both [1] and [3] are focused on the automatic selection of the best camera view in ball sports without interaction of the TD, and specifically they considered that an interesting shot is the one that obtains the best view of the ball and the one that provides a clear view, respectively. In [2] the use of location-dependent queries [5] was proposed as the basic building block for monitoring sport events and help the TD in the broadcasting task; however, the system had several limitations, as it was not able to manage 3D models of the queries and the scenes, and occlusions among objects were not taken into account. In [4] the TD can input his/her desired shot in terms of the specific objects involved (by selecting their name from a list), the minimum percentage of them that must be covered by the camera (as a percentage), the kind of view that the camera must obtain of the object (selecting between front/rear, top/bottom, and/or right/left side), etc.…”

Visual 3D Model-based Tracking toward Autonomous Live Sports Broadcasting using a VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in GPS-Impaired Environments

“…Recently, multiple moving colour cameras and image processing techniques allow viewers to see dynamic scenes from a variety of angles [2,3]. As many cameras are used for providing better coverage of the field, especially for soccer and football, technology for choosing the optimal camera is important [4,5]. Some systems detect multiple players and track them with PTZ camera automatically [6].…”

“…Some systems extract highlight scenes by analysing sports broadcasts using the intensity of acoustics, by using keywords such as "goal" spoken by an announcer, or using visual feature sequences and so on [7,8,9]. Many commercial products apply augmented reality to sports broadcasts, such as the BBC Piero system 1 , Viz Arena 2 , Tog Sports 3 , and Spider Cam 4 . All of these technologies provide improved quality of sports broadcasting, but the most basic task for applying these technologies is capturing dynamic scenes in a variety of angles.…”