Sportsvantage: Sports platform developed by DCU researchers

Smartphones can enrich the fan experience by delivering content to fans that provide them with additional information about the important events in the game with their social context, relevant opinions, and reactions. SportsVantage is a software platform developed by a DCU research team at Insight capable of generating personalized highlights of sporting events in real-time that can be delivered to smartphones or tablets within a sports stadium. Highlights are generated by jointly analyzing the social media feed (Twitter) and broadcast feed associated with the event to detect and recognize important or exciting events. Taking these outputs, a content generation engine produces personalized content for spectators who have signed up for the service.

Analyzing social media enables us to not only find game events such as goals and fouls, but also more unexpected events such as memes, performance, surge in support and others. The system uses a knowledge base of players, fixtures, teams and leagues to construct queries that retrieve a real-time content stream from the Twitter API. The system processes incoming broadcast video streams in real-time and performs various types of processing and analysis on these streams. The results of this processing and analysis is then forwarded to the aggregator component where it is combined with outputs from the social media analysis module to produce rich event summaries which are then delivered to the user interface.

Several types of analysis and processing is performed on the video streams including temporal segmentation and transcoding, keyframe extraction, shot type classification (e.g. close-up head and shoulders, long shot center of field, etc.), scoreboard detection and parsing, and high-level audiovisual event classification (goal detection, etc.). The high-level event summary contains the following information: a video clip summarizing the event; a set of ordered keyframes for the event; an ordered set of key terms (goal, corner, etc.) that describe what happened in the event; a textual summary of the event; important tweets related to the event; and a set of players likely to be involved in the event.