In recent years, there has been increased interest in video summarization and automatic sports highlights generation. In this work, we introduce a new dataset, called SNOW, for umpire pose detection in the game of cricket. The proposed dataset is evaluated as a preliminary aid for developing systems to automatically generate cricket highlights. In cricket, the umpire has the authority to make important decisions about events on the field. The umpire signals important events using unique hand signals and gestures. We identify four such events for classification namely SIX, NO BALL, OUT and WIDE based on detecting the pose of the umpire from the frames of a cricket video. Pre-trained convolutional neural networks such as Inception V3 and VGG19 net-works are selected as primary candidates for feature extraction. The results are obtained using a linear SVM classifier. The highest classification performance was achieved for the SVM trained on features extracted from the VGG19 network. The preliminary results suggest that the proposed system is an effective solution for the application of cricket highlights generation.
With the advances in hardware technologies and deep learning techniques, it has become feasible to apply these techniques in diverse fields. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), an architecture from the field of deep learning, has revolutionized Computer Vision. Sports is one of the avenues in which the use of computer vision is thriving. Cricket is a complex game consisting of different types of shots, bowling actions and many other activities. Every bowler, in a game of cricket, bowls with a different bowling action. We leverage this point to identify different bowlers. In this paper, we have proposed a CNN model to identify eighteen different cricket bowlers based on their bowling actions using transfer learning. Additionally, we have created a completely new dataset containing 8100 images of these eighteen bowlers to train the proposed framework and evaluate its performance. We have used the VGG16 model pre-trained with the ImageNet dataset and added a few layers on top of it to build our model. After trying out different strategies, we found that freezing the weights for the first 14 layers of the network and training the rest of the layers works best. Our approach achieves an overall average accuracy of 93.3% on the test set and converges to a very low cross-entropy loss.
In this paper, we deal with the problem of temporal action localization for a large-scale untrimmed cricket videos dataset. Our action of interest for cricket videos is a cricket stroke played by a batsman, which is, usually, covered by cameras placed at the stands of the cricket ground at both ends of the cricket pitch. After applying a sequence of preprocessing steps, we have ~73 million frames for 1110 videos in the dataset at constant frame rate and resolution. The method of localization is a generalized one which applies a trained random forest model for CUTs detection(using summed up grayscale histogram difference features) and two linear SVM camera models(CAM1 and CAM2) for first frame detection, trained on HOG features of CAM1 and CAM2 video shots. CAM1 and CAM2 are assumed to be part of the cricket stroke. At the predicted boundary positions, the HOG features of the first frames are computed and a simple algorithm was used to combine the positively predicted camera shots. In order to make the process as generic as possible, we did not consider any domain specific knowledge, such as tracking or specific shape and motion features. The detailed analysis of our methodology is provided along with the metrics used for evaluation of individual models, and the final predicted segments. We achieved a weighted mean TIoU of 0.5097 over a small sample of the test set.
Cricket betting is a multi-billion dollar market. Therefore, there is a strong incentive for models that can predict the outcomes of games and beat the odds provided by bookers. The aim of this study was to investigate to what degree it is possible to predict the outcome of cricket matches. The target competition was the English twenty over county cricket cup. The original features alongside engineered features gave rise to more than 500 team and player statistics. The models were optimized firstly with team features only and then both team and player features. The performance of the models was tested over individual seasons from 2009 to 2014 having been trained over previous season data in each case. The optimal model was a simple prediction method combined with complex hierarchical features and was shown to significantly outperform a gambling industry benchmark.