Robert Oldfield

Object-based audio for interactive football broadcast

An end-to-end AV broadcast system providing an immersive, interactive experience for live events is the development aim for the EU FP7 funded project, FascinatE. The project has developed real time audio object event detection and localisation, scene modelling and processing methods for multimedia data, which will allow users to navigate the event by creating their own unique user-defined scene. As part of the first implementation of the system a test shoot was carried out capturing a live Premier League football game and methods have been developed to detect, analyse, extract and localise salient audio events from a range of sensors and represent them within an audio scene in order to allow free navigation within the scene. Within this context, this paper describes a procedure for the detection, extraction and localisation of ball-kicks and whistle-blows from the pitch-side microphones used in the broadcast of football and describes a potential audio streaming format for an object-based broadcast.

Demo paper: Audio object extraction for live sports broadcast

Recent interest in object-based audio systems for cinema opens interesting possibilities to extend the reach of an object-based approach to television broadcast of live events. For events where microphones may be placed close to the source of each sound (e.g. live music) this is relatively straightforward, however for sports events audio objects must be derived from multiple distant microphones. This presents significant challenges in extracting discrete audio objects with coordinate locations from a live event in real time. The research presented here demonstrates the extraction of audio objects from a UK Premier League football (soccer) game using only standard pitch-side microphone positions. Ball-kicks and whistle-blows are extracted in real time with small latency and location information is derived that is used to position the object using 3D coordinates. The resultant sound scene description allows rendering across any reproduction system, including with-height systems. The techniques are equally applicable to other sports with revised object identification templates.