Counterattack detection in broadcast soccer videos using camera motion estimation

This paper presents a new method for counterattack detection using estimated camera motion and evaluates some classification methods to detect this event. To this end, video is partitioned to shots and view type of each shot is recognized first. Then, relative pan of the camera during far-view and medium-view shots is estimated. After weighting of pan value of each frame according to the type of shots, the video is partitioned to motion segments. Then, motion segments are refined to achieve better results. Finally, the features extracted from consecutive motion segments are investigated for counterattack detection. We propose two methods for counterattack detection: (1) rule-based (heuristic rules) and (2) SVM-based. Experiments show that the SVM classifier with linear or RBF kernel results in the best results.