An overview of automatic event detection in soccer matches

Sports video analysis has received special attention from researchers due to its high popularity and general interest on semantic analysis. Hence, soccer videos represent an interesting field for research allowing many types of applications: indexing, summarization, players´ behavior recognition and so forth. Many approaches have been applied for field extraction and recognition, arc and goalmouth detection, ball and players tracking, and high level techniques such as team tactics detection and soccer models definition. In this paper, we provide an hierarchy and we classify approaches into this hierarchy based on their analysis level, i.e., low, middle, and high levels. An overview of soccer event identification is presented and we discuss general issues related to it in order to provide relevant information about what has been done on soccer video processing.