Teaching Machines to Understand Baseball Games: Large-Scale Baseball Video Database for Multiple Video Understanding Tasks

Minho Shim, Young Hwi Kim, Kyungmin Kim, Seon Joo Kim; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 404-420

A major obstacle in teaching machines to understand videos is the lack of training data, as creating temporal annotations for long videos requires a huge amount of human effort. To this end, we introduce a new large-scale baseball video dataset called the BBDB, which is produced semi-automatically by using play-by-play texts available online. The BBDB contains 4200 hours of baseball game videos with 400k temporally annotated activity segments. The new dataset has several major challenging factors compared to other datasets: 1) the dataset contains a large number of visually similar segments with different labels. 2) It can be used for many video understanding tasks including video recognition, localization, text-video alignment, video highlight generation, and data imbalance problem. To observe the potential of the BBDB, we conducted extensive experiments by running many different types of video understanding algorithms on our new dataset. The database is available at https://sites.google.com/site/eccv2018bbdb/