SBIR Phase I: Semi-Automated Sports Video Search

这个小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目将开发新技术，使体育视频的精确搜索成为可能。用户将能够从录制的大型体育视频广播档案中搜索特定的球员、球队和比赛。这项拟议的研究将建立在麻省理工学院团队开发的体育视频搜索引擎的早期结果基础上。该方法结合了从语音转录中挖掘的语义信息和使用视频分析算法提取的视觉信息。这项拟议的研究将把为棒球视频开发的现有软件算法扩展到其他职业和大学运动。将开发更多的软件工具，以提高搜索系统的准确性，并将设计基于自然语言处理算法的新用户界面，使用户能够简化对视频的访问。这项研究的预期结果是一种准确的视频搜索和索引方法，该方法能够通过自然语言进行查询，并且与现有技术相比，对视频进行初始标记所需的人力显著减少。这项研究的更广泛影响来自将这项技术作为服务层的商业化，它为多个细分市场提供搜索和索引解决方案，这些细分市场加在一起代表着美国数十亿美元的行业。这项研究满足了至少三个细分市场的需求：(1)体育专业人士，他们将获得强大的视频访问工具，从而能够更好地对球员进行评估、招募、教练和比赛分析；(2)体育新闻提供商，他们能够将新闻故事链接到相关视频剪辑，从而增加其媒体产品的价值；(3)体育迷，他们将能够轻松地搜索和浏览体育视频档案，从而提供新的广告机会。初步的市场研究表明，这项技术实现的访问将对体育视频的使用方式产生广泛影响。此外，该方法稍后可能会扩展到从体育应用到其他视频领域。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop new technology that will enable precise search of sports videos. Users will be able to search for specific players, teams, and plays from large archives of recorded video sports broadcasts. The proposed research will build on early results of a sports video search engine developed by the team at MIT. The approach combines semantic information mined from speech transcriptions with visual information extracted using video analysis algorithms. The proposed research will extend the existing software algorithms that have been developed for baseball video to other professional and college sports. Additional software tools will be developed to increase the accuracy of the search system, and new user interfaces based on natural language processing algorithms will be designed to enable simplified user access to video. The anticipated result of this research is a method for accurate video search and indexing that enables queries by natural language and requires significantly less human labor to initially tag video than existing techniques. The broader impact of this research comes from the commercialization of this technology as a service layer which provides search and indexing solutions to multiple market segments that together represent a multibillion dollar industry in the United States. The research meets the needs of at least three market segments: (1) Sports professionals, who will gain powerful video access tools enabling better player evaluation, recruiting, coaching, and game analysis; (2) Sports news providers, who will be able to link news stories to related video clips thereby adding value to their media offerings; (3) Sports fans, who will be able to search and browse sports video archives with ease, providing new opportunities for advertising. Initial market research suggests that the access enabled by this technology would have broad impact on how sports video is used. Furthermore, the approach may later be extended to apply beyond sports to other video domains.