CANBERRA, Australia -- For every 5-minute sports highlight you see on the evening news, some sleep-deprived editor has spent hours poring over game tapes.
Uma Srinivasan, of the Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organization in Australia, wants to make that editor's life easier.
Her team at CSIRO's Digital Media Information Systems has created the Sports Highlight System, software that scans digitized sports footage to pick out highlights based on visual cues such as quick camera pans and zooms or audio cues such as cheers from the crowd.
Years of watching televised cricket matches inspired Srinivasan.
"When you're in the next room and you hear the crowd roar, you come running," she said. "Crowd cheers are inherent in the sports genre. It's appropriate to look at the audio content."
There are similar systems that look for visual cues, but Srinivasan says her software is unique in its use of audio and visual.
The hub of the Sports Highlight System prototype is an Informix database server. However, it is a distributed system using HTML and Java, so remote users can compile footage through the Web, define their own search parameters, and create their own highlights.
It takes the program about 20 minutes to compile the highlights of a four-hour cricket match -- longer if the match was exciting.
Because different sports vary drastically in terms of action and crowd response, the team has to create a different model for each sport. Srinivasan and her team have completed models for cricket and basketball, and are almost finished with models for tennis and Australian Rules Football, a sport similar to rugby.
Tennis poses a challenge because the crowds are so polite.
"What do you call a highlight in tennis? It's a bit difficult to detect," said Srinivasan. "A cheer happens after a long volley or something. But is that a highlight?"
Australian television sports journalists are making mixed calls on the idea of a computer replacing a human editor. Craig Reynolds, producer of the Australian Channel 10 show Sports Tonight, feels the technology could give reporters the chance to offer more in-depth coverage.
"If I've got a reporter sitting down watching a cricket game in front of a television all day, he's not out there doing interviews and talking to people," he said, "and doing the things computers can't do ... or can't do at the moment, at least."
Peter Guion, former cricket editor and producer of the Australian version of the Wide World of Sports, doesn't see how it could help his staff.
"We actually [edit highlights] as the game happens, rather than wait until the game's all over," he said. "It wouldn't be useful. The deadline's so close, you don't wait until the whole game's finished before you start cutting it down."
"I'd still prefer to look at [the game] myself before I decide what to use," he added.
Srinivasan remains optimistic, however, that her software will catch on, once digital television transmission is widely adopted.
"So far, everyone likes it, but they need the digital infrastructure to start using it," she said.
The only other problem? "It doesn't have a cool name, yet," Srinivasan said.
