Detect and Recognize Clock Time in Sports Video

Abstract

Analyzing overlay content in sports video could help us to get reference information about the game. For example, the digital clock on score board, which indicates elapsed time of the game, is very useful to sports game summarization, indexing and retrieval. However, existing methods can only handle well when time clock is on a clean background and appears all the time. This paper has proposed a more general approach to locate and recognize the digit characters on soccer videos. It is notably efficient in reading the clock digits on a transparent overlay, where the clock digits appear and disappear, and they are blurred due to compression. Experimental results show that this approach is robust regardless of contrast, font-size, font-color and background complexity. It is also simple and quick enough for real time clock reading while the video is playing.