Analyzing Hockey Broadcast Videos Using Machine Learning

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Public entertainment around the world is dominated by sports, particularly on television. A prominent issue with its delivery to the public is that there is a significant delay after a game until analytics and useful commentary are available to the public and the teams. Also, the compilation, summarization, and presentation of these data is largely done by humans watching videos of a sporting event on TV. Therefore, the amount of available and interesting data are currently very limited. Potentially, these analytics would be a very lucrative source of income for the sports industry, as well as a valuable tool for coaches and managers of sports teams. Clearly, automated content-aware sports video analysis would be extremely useful in this regard. A recent (May, 2018) paper [1] surveys this field of activity in great detail. It found that "...more than 80% of papers in the literature addressed baseball, basketball, soccer and tennis. It lists only three(!) papers in total on the subject of hockey. The research in this application proposes to change this situation. Using Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence, this research is motivated by two societal factors: 1) The pervasiveness of sports as entertainment, and 2) a significant lack of automated collection and analysis of sports data. Because of the significance of hockey to Canadians, the sport we are addressing is professional hockey. It addresses and emphasizes Machine Learning to "understand" and determine hockey analytics. Specifically, the focus is on providing the capability of automatically analyzing video content offline to both detect and quantify relevant temporal and spatial events, in this case, NHL broadcast videos of hockey games.We refer to this as content-aware hockey video analysis. A unique technical feature of this proposal is that we will employ both readily available video and verbal data (Closed Captioning) to perform the content analysis of the hockey game. The research program will focus on the following related projects. Project #1: A system for analyzing hockey broadcast videos, primarily employing pictorial, video and linguistic descriptions of the objects, actions, and events in the video (What is happening on the ice?). Later, we will address Project #2: Based on #1, new methods for computing practical hockey analytics to support coaches and trainers. (What practical data can be gleaned from the videos?). The proposed approach can be referred to as Intelligent Multimodal Video Content Analysis (IMVCA). That is, the capability of automatically analyzing and interpreting both video and language content offline with the aim of detecting and quantifying specific spatial and temporal hockey events. In our case, we exploit broadcast videos of hockey games, but in fact, the methodology could be applied to interpret any video containing Closed Captioning (CC). As such it will be a vehicle for advancing methods for the analysis of videos.