Game suspension boundary detection by reading two clocks for broadcast basketball video

This paper presents a novel algorithm for finding suspension boundaries (starting and end time points of event) of broadcast basketball videos, which employs the superimposed features extracted from the game clock and the shot clock to infer the suspension boundary. The main challenge of suspension boundary detection in the proposed way is to read (localize and recognize) the game clock and the shot clock. The difficulties of reading the two clocks from basketball videos lie in that the two clocks are independent from each other and are paused and reset frequently. This paper proposes two new techniques against the difficulties. The first new technique is a new set of functions of instantiating the second-periodicity method to identify the pixels inside second-regions without knowing the transit frames of two clocks. The second technique is a procedure of finding the proper digit-sequence from the second place of the shot clock. This technique solves the difficulty caused by the frequent pauses and the resets of two clocks. With the information extracted from the game clock and the shot clock this paper infers the start and the end time points of suspension clips. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can find much more accurate boundary points of suspensions at a much lower computing cost than the existing algorithms can.