EVER dashed home to watch a video of the big match only to find yourself
sitting through a tiresome couple of hours in which nothing much happens? A new
computer program being developed by Sharp, the Japanese consumer electronics
firm, aims to spare you such let-downs by picking out the highlights and putting
them together as a compilation videotape.
“In sports, very often the amount of interesting play is much shorter than
the entire game,” says Peter van Beek at Sharp’s US research lab in Camas,
Washington. “Highlights and indexing information would allow viewers to skip
uninteresting parts,” he says.
Most broadcasters transmit slow-motion replays of the best action in a game,
like a goal in football or a baseball strikeout. So van Beek searches for these
sequences to pick out the most interesting highlights.
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Slow-motion effects are usually produced by repeating the previous frame,
says van Beek. To find slow-motion segments of play, van Beek’s software
analyses each video frame and compares it with a number of frames on either
side. The system also looks for the video effects broadcasters use to signal the
start of replays, such as a flying programme logo.
Having identified the slow-motion sections of the video, the new system
generates an index of highlights. These can then be played in sequence or
expanded to show, for example, each action sequence followed by the slow-motion
replay.
To keep slow-motion sequences from adverts out of the highlights, van Beek’s
system assesses the spectrum of colours that are most likely to make up video
frames from the game. If a slow-motion event doesn’t match this spectrum, the
software ignores it.
Sharp wants to build the new technology into future generations of consumer
equipment. These are expected to include hard-disc video recorders and
integrated digital TV sets as well as VCRs.
But the software could also have professional uses. Darren Long, head of
operations at the satellite broadcaster Sky Sports in London, says he’d find the
system useful for producing compilation tapes of games for archiving. “At the
moment, it’s done manually overnight—it’s very time consuming,” he says.
“There are things you’d want, like if someone makes a great run, that we’d never
do a slo-mo on, but if this could tag the majority of things, we can insert the
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