• HiMPACT™
• Face Location and Tracking
• Scanner Reproduction
• Battery Optimization

HiMPACT™ Sports Technology

Sports video entertainment has an annual consumer value of over $11 billion in the U.S. Market growth is being driven by increased consumer access to more sports content via the TV and Internet. To capitalize on this market surge, Sharp Technology Ventures offers HiMPACT Sports™. This sports technology includes algorithms that, in real time, automatically detect every key event in a sports broadcast video, such as every play in football and every pitch in baseball. Independently generated, rich textual descriptions, such as SportsTicker® data, are automatically synchronized with key event segments.

The HiMPACT Sports technology has application in both professional and consumer market segments. In the professional domain, HiMPACT caters to the needs of content producers, broadcasters, leagues and teams. Automatic processing has a cost advantage over manual processing and produces consistent and objective results. Further, the SportsTicker synchronization task is too difficult and time consuming, if not impossible, for a human operator to perform.

In the consumer market, indexing, retrieval, and summarization of sports broadcast programs are of major interest to sports content producers who routinely log in and retrieve exciting events of games for producing game summaries or highlight videos. In a typical sports broadcast studio, up to 120 channels may be processed simultaneously.  

In addition, there is a market for sports content providers to offer searchable databases for consumers. Some Internet services give customers the ability to retrieve video segments of their favorite games or players and create their own customized summaries by putting these segments together. One such service, MLB.TV, had 20,000 people register in its first two weeks at $79.99 for the season, or $14.95 per month.

HiMPACT Sports technology has been successfully applied to action-stop sports, such as baseball, football and sumo wrestling, and to continuous-action sports, such as soccer. The underlying framework of HiMPACT is modifiable, thus allowing for possible extensions to event detection in any type of sport, in surveillance and in other domains.

HiMPACT Sports technology enables

• automatic highlight generation
• indexing for searchable play-by-play databases
• condensed plays-only summaries of sports broadcast videos  

HiMPACT Coach has recently been added to the HiMPACT Sports suite. The software processes football coaching videos online, and in real time, to automatically identify the in and out points of all scoreboard, sideline view and end zone view shots of plays. Sideline and end zone views of a play are interlaced and corresponding scoreboard shots are placed in-between plays. The HiMPACT Coach software is an ideal enhancement to existing acquisition and logging systems, allowing the coaching staff to immediately access and start logging and play, sideline or end zone shots. Manual searching and marking of plays and associated shots is unnecessary, greatly improving the efficiency and speed of logging. NFL and college teams are potential users of the HiMPACT Coach technology.

IP Summary
This technology is supported by 8 pending patents.