Matching faces with textual cues in soccer videos

In soccer videos, most significant actions are usually followed by close-up shots of players that take part in the action itself. Automatically annotating the identity of the players present in these shots would be considerably valuable for indexing and retrieval applications. Due to high variations in pose and illumination across shots however, current face recognition methods are not suitable for this task. We show how the inherent multiple media structure of soccer videos can be exploited to understand the players' identity without relying on direct face recognition. The proposed method is based on a combination of interest point detector to "read" textual cues that allow to label a player with its name, such as the number depicted on its jersey, or the superimposed text caption showing its name. Players not identified by this process are then assigned to one of the labeled faces by means of a face similarity measure, again based on the appearance of local salient patches. We present results obtained from soccer videos taken from various recent games between national teams.