Key frame extraction based on global motion statistics for team-sport videos

Key frame extraction is an important manner of video summarization. It can be used to interpret video content quickly. Existing approaches first partition the entire video into video clips by shot boundary detection, and then, extract key frames by frame clustering. However, in most team-sport videos, a video clip usually includes many events, and it is difficult to extract the key frames related to all of these events accurately, because different events of a game shot can have features of similar appearance. As is well known, most events in team-sport videos are attack and defense conversions, which are related to global translation. Therefore, by using fine-grained partition based on the global motion, a shot could be further partitioned into more video clips, from which more key frames could be extracted and they are related to the events. In this study, global horizontal motion is introduced to further partition video clips into fine-grained video clips. Furthermore, global motion statistics are utilized to extract candidate key frames. Finally, the representative key frames are extracted based on the spatial–temporal consistence and hierarchical clustering, and the redundant frames are removed. A dataset called SportKF is built, which includes 25 videos of 197,878 frames in 112 min and 764 key frames from four types of sports (basketball, football, American football and field hockey). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art performance by introducing global motion statistics.