  We present a parameterized approach to produce personalized variable length
summaries of soccer matches. Our approach is based on temporally segmenting the
soccer video into 'plays', associating a user-specifiable 'utility' for each
type of play and using 'bin-packing' to select a subset of the plays that add
up to the desired length while maximizing the overall utility (volume in
bin-packing terms). Our approach systematically allows a user to override the
default weights assigned to each type of play with individual preferences and
thus see a highly personalized variable length summarization of soccer matches.
We demonstrate our approach based on the output of an end-to-end pipeline that
we are building to produce such summaries. Though aspects of the overall
end-to-end pipeline are human assisted at present, the results clearly show
that the proposed approach is capable of producing semantically meaningful and
compelling summaries. Besides the obvious use of producing summaries of
superior league matches for news broadcasts, we anticipate our work to promote
greater awareness of the local matches and junior leagues by producing
consumable summaries of them.
