Searching Sportscasts

A new kind of visual-search engine has been developed to automatically scour sports footage for clips showing specific types of action and events. According to its creators, borrowing a few tricks from the field of machine translation seems to make all the difference in improving the accuracy of video search. Despite recent advances in visual-search engines, accurate video search still remains a challenge, particularly when dealing with sports footage, says Michael Fleischman, a computer scientist at MIT. "The difference between a home run and a foul ball is often hard for a human novice to notice, and nearly impossible for a machine to recognize." To cope with growing video repositories, cutting-edge systems are now emerging that use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to try to improve the search accuracy by generating text transcripts. The trouble is, search terms are often repeated out of context, says Fleischman.