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.
鈥淚n sports, very often the amount of interesting play is much shorter than
the entire game,鈥� says Peter van Beek at Sharp鈥檚 US research lab in Camas,
Washington. 鈥淗ighlights and indexing information would allow viewers to skip
uninteresting parts,鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檚
system assesses the spectrum of colours that are most likely to make up video
frames from the game. If a slow-motion event doesn鈥檛 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鈥檇 find the
system useful for producing compilation tapes of games for archiving. 鈥淎t the
moment, it鈥檚 done manually overnight鈥攊t鈥檚 very time consuming,鈥� he says.
鈥淭here are things you鈥檇 want, like if someone makes a great run, that we鈥檇 never
do a slo-mo on, but if this could tag the majority of things, we can insert the
辞迟丑别谤蝉.鈥�