Introduction to my PhD Research

Hello. My name is Alfian Abdul Halin, and I am a PhD student at the School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. This is my first attempt at doing research by the way. Because my bachelor's (obviously) and masters were both coursework :) So, I hope I can find the niche in my PhD work, and hopefully graduate so that I could start (and hopefully JUMP start) my academic career, insya-Allaah (meaning God Willing). Ok! So let me introduce my research work :)

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I am basically doing something that has already been done before, only that I hope to provide a new or improved solution. So basically, my research is under the category of OLD-PROBLEM NEW-SOLUTION group.

My interest is in sports, particularly soccer. Even though they call it football from where I come from (Malaysia), let's just use the term soccer for the sake of not confusing it with American Football (why they call it that? I have no idea, for not much FOOT action is used :P).

For my PhD research, I plan to look at the detection of important events in digitally RECORDED soccer videos (that means, LIVE TELECASTS are out of my domain). Besides events, I would also like to examine the structure of the video itself, where I could possibly identify important video segments.

For events, it's the normal stuff. I am now looking at a better way (or more intuitive way) to detect GOALS, YELLOW CARDS, RED CARDS, SUBSTITUTION, FREE KICKS etc. For important segments, I am looking to search for FIRST-HALF, SECOND-HALF, FIRST-HALF ANALYSIS, FULL-TIME or MATCH ANALYSIS, TEAM STARTING LINEUP, FORMATION etc.

Yes... yes... I know... the work has been done before. Among the good ones are such as listed under the BIBLIOGRAPHY label (as can be seen at my blog's sidebar).

Anywayz, my work, hopefully, will look at how to improve event detection by minimizing (or maybe optimizing) processing of video! The results should be...:

1. A better framework that will minimize the need for video processing,
2. Higher accuracy (in terms of PRECISION and RECALL) for event or segment detection.

And once detected, I will create a proper (semantic) index, so that soccer fans, as well as anyone interested, can browse a particular soccer game... or also possibly look for an event or video segment of interest (from a particular game) using intuitive or high(human)-level queries... :)

IN ALL, I hope this index can be built, and also... I hope to achieve a certain amount of novlty so that I could contribute to the Semantic Video Analysis Knowledge, as well as... of course... get my PhD degree :D

Ok... Cheerios! Will update on some more things later....

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