Real-time video content analysis tool for consumer media storage system

With the growing storage capacities of hard-disks and optical discs, large consumer video databases are gradually developing. The large effective storage capacity using compressed video leads to the application of fast storage and retrieval functions, to enable quick user-friendly searching for and access to specific parts of the video data. We explore the feasibility of a near real-time semantic sports video analyzer for an experimental consumer media server. This tool is able to automatically extract and analyze key events in a video sequence. The analyzer employs several visual cues and a model for real-world coordinates, so that key parameters (e.g. speed and position) of a player can be determined with sufficient accuracy. This special data can be stored as metadata, thereby facilitating intelligent searching of events. The tool consists of four processing steps: (1) playing frame detection, (2) court extraction, as well as a 3-D camera model, (3) player segmentation and tracking, and (4) event-based high-level analysis exploiting visual cues extracted in the real-world. Our system has been evaluated in a new distributed AV content analysis system for home entertainment. We show attractive experimental results indicating the system efficiency and classification skills, thereby offering new analysis and search/retrieval tools to the consumer