Semantic Annotation and Adaptation of Live Sports Videos

This paper addresses multimedia tools for universal multimedia access to sports videos by means of automatic annotation and content-based adaptation. The goal is to provide boosting technologies to allow the new generations of mobile devices (phones and PDAs) to better exploit the available bandwidth and to achieve a reasonable cost/quality trade-off in remote access to long-lasting live events, such as sport competitions. Although the available bandwidth for mobile communication has increased thanks to new telecommunication standards such as GPRSand UMTS, it is still insufficient for high quality video transmission. The limited resources of low-cost terminals and the high costs of data transfer hinder de-facto many possible multimedia services. First, the quality is limited by the small display size and memory available on many mobile devices. Second, the limited bandwidthmay affect user satisfaction either because of the time spent waiting for the download or the latency in streaming a live video. Moreover, even if the user is willing to wait for the download or accepts frame dropping, a reduction of data to send would be unavoidable in order to bring down the costs of the service. As a matter of fact, most telecommunication companies charge a fee proportional to the number of bytes transferred. Hence, the cost of accessing a long-lasting live video, such as a 90-minute soccer competition, is stilltoo high for most users.