Formula 1 onboard camera shot detector using motion activity areas

Shot detection in sports video sequences has been of great interest in the last years. In this paper, a new approach to detect onboard camera shots in compressed Formula 1 video sequences is presented. To that end, and after studying the characteristics of the shot, a technique based in the thresholding comparison between a high motion area and a stationary one has been devised. Efficient computation is achieved by direct decoding of the motion vectors in the MPEG stream. The shot detection process is done through a frame-by-frame hysteresis thresholding analysis. In order to enhance the results, a SVD shot boundary detector is applied. Promising results are presented that show the validity of the approach.