Comprehensive Soccer Video Understanding: Towards Human-comparable Video Understanding System in Constrained Environment

Comprehensive video understanding, a challenging task in computer vision to understand videos like humans, has been explored in ways including object detection and tracking, action classification. However, most works for video understanding mainly focus on isolated aspects of video analysis, yet ignore the inner correlation among those tasks. Sports games videos can serve as a perfect research object with restrictive conditions, while complex and challenging enough to study the core problems in computer vision comprehensively. In this paper, we propose a new soccer video database named SoccerDB with the benchmark of object detection, action recognition, temporal action detection, and highlight detection. We further survey a collection of strong baselines on SoccerDB, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on each independent task in recent years. We believe that the release of SoccerDB will tremendously advance researches of combining different tasks in closed form around the comprehensive video understanding problem.