Too Much SPORTS Video!

As many of you already know, digital video can be (digitally, of course :P) viewed from almost anywhere. You have your mobile-TVs, mobile-phones, laptops, PDAs, electronic billboards and obviously, your personal computer.

An advancement that has made viewing digital videos possible is the speed wise improvements made to Internet connections. Nowadays, 1 Megabit per second is a no brainer. At this, or higher speeds, users can seamlessly download and view any type of video in (almost) real-time!

In addition to that, storage devices such as Blueray, Portable Hard Disks and Flash Memory, CDs and DVDs have become so affordable. This allows people to store their videos; the creation of personal repositories. In Malaysia, ~200 Gigabytes of storage can be bought from under 200 Ringgit Malaysia (around 60 to 64 US Dollars). USB Memory Sticks can now store Gigabytes of storage, making themselves ideal candidates for temporary repositories, managing the storage of up to 4 high-quality movies at a time.

Another technology that has made its way into the home of consumers is the video capture cards. Savvy computer users can plug one of these contraptions into their PC; attach it to a TV, and presto! You can record your video in no time. For the least savvy, DVD recorders are now available, making recording your favorite sitcom or football match a no brainers. Furthermore, you'd have the recording on a DVD, which provides Gigabytes of storage.

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With all of this said, we can see that there is no problem for anyone (with means of course) to get a hold of their video of choice. Sports video is considered one of the popular genres due to its wide fan base (even some housewives LOVE soccer as much as their husbands). Besides that, there are the huge commercial benefits attached such as advertising.

TV broadcast companies, as well as individual users, can have video archives, consisting of hundreds (or even thousands) of Gigabytes of video documents. With all of this video in their hands, is it really possible to manage all of it? Can you really find what you want in this huge repository of information? ... ... ... Let us look at an example:

Xander and his team are asked to produce a 30-minute video showing the past exploits of Diego Armando Maradona. They are required to look for the BEST past footage of Maradona, which are his individual goals, his Hand-of-God goal, as well as all his previous teams/clubs.

The station stores ALL of Maradona's videos, and fortunately, all are in digital format :) The size of the archive is around 300 Gigabytes, consisting of documentaries, friendly games, international games, club games etc.

Now... the problem is... how can the team go about and look for the best footage of Maradona in hundreds and hundreds of hours of video, as well as in thousands of gigabytes worth of media? Should there be a division of team who could go and wade (and I mean wade...) through each video to get the best footage?

You and I know the answer to this... and it's a definite NO! NO-NO as a matter of fact. To MANUALLY go through archives of videos is indeed a problem. And if no proper annotation or indexing is done, the whole task is downright prohibitive....

And even if there's a computerized mechanism for all of this, how does the team search for a particular Maradona event? Is it possible to type in a query, for example: "Look for Maradona Hand-of-God goal", and get a good match from the archive/database? ... Hmmmm... MAYBE THERE IS?

How can this be done? ... Now, this is actually the MAIN part of my research... and it will attempt to tackle a popular issue/problem in the world of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. This problem is called the SEMANTIC GAP!