  Highlights in a sport video are usually referred as actions that stimulate
excitement or attract attention of the audience. A big effort is spent in
designing techniques which find automatically highlights, in order to
automatize the otherwise manual editing process. Most of the state-of-the-art
approaches try to solve the problem by training a classifier using the
information extracted on the tv-like framing of players playing on the game
pitch, learning to detect game actions which are labeled by human observers
according to their perception of highlight. Obviously, this is a long and
expensive work. In this paper, we reverse the paradigm: instead of looking at
the gameplay, inferring what could be exciting for the audience, we directly
analyze the audience behavior, which we assume is triggered by events happening
during the game. We apply deep 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) to
extract visual features from cropped video recordings of the supporters that
are attending the event. Outputs of the crops belonging to the same frame are
then accumulated to produce a value indicating the Highlight Likelihood (HL)
which is then used to discriminate between positive (i.e. when a highlight
occurs) and negative samples (i.e. standard play or time-outs). Experimental
results on a public dataset of ice-hockey matches demonstrate the effectiveness
of our method and promote further research in this new exciting direction.
