This paper presents the framework of a general video summarisation system on the rushes collection, which formalises the summarisation process as an 0 − 1 Knapsack optimisation problem. Three stages are included, namely content analysis, content selection and summary composition. Content analysis is the pre-processing step, consisting of shot segmentation, feature extraction, raw video discrimination and shot clustering. Content selection weights the importance of video segments by an attention model. A greedy approximation approach is employed in the composition of summary videos with a cost function, which balances the video importance gain and the duration cost. The average content coverage achieved on the rushes test collection is about 29%, while the average score on readability is 3.13 with the redundancy credit at 4.08.

Abstract. Attention is a psychological measurement of human reflection against stimulus. We propose a general framework of highlight detection by comparing attention intensity during the watching of sports videos. Three steps are involved: adaptive selection on salient features, unified attention estimation and highlight identification. Adaptive selection computes feature correlation to decide an optimal set of salient features. Unified estimation combines these features by the technique of multi-resolution auto-regressive (MAR) and thus creates a temporal curve of attention intensity. We rank the intensity of attention to discriminate boundaries of highlights. Such a framework alleviates semantic uncertainty around sport highlights and leads to an efficient and effective highlight detection. The advantages are as follows: (1) the capability of using data at coarse temporal resolutions; (2) the robustness against noise caused by modality asynchronism, perception uncertainty and feature mismatch; (3) the employment of Markovian constrains on content presentation, and (4) multi-resolution estimation on attention intensity, which enables the precise allocation of event boundaries. Key words:highlight detection, attention computation, sports video analysis 1