Recognition of player actions in broadcast sports video is a challenging task due to low resolution of the players in video frames. In this paper, we present a novel method to recognize the basic player actions in broadcast tennis video. Different from the existing appearance-based approaches, our method is based on motion analysis and considers the relationship between the movements of different body parts and the regions in the image plane. A novel motion descriptor is proposed and supervised learning is employed to train the action classifier. We also propose a novel framework by combining the player action recognition with other multimodal features for semantic and tactic analysis of the broadcast tennis video. Incorporating action recognition into the framework not only improves the semantic indexing and retrieval performance of the video content, but also conducts highlights ranking and tactics analysis in tennis matches, which is the first solution to our knowledge for tennis game. The experimental results demonstrate that our player action recognition method outperforms existing appearance-based approaches and the multimodal framework is effective for broadcast tennis video analysis.
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