Virtual spotlighted advertising for tennis videos

How to effectively and less-intrusively deliver the advertising message by spatially replacing regions with advertisements in a period of exposure time for sports videos has been known as a challenging problem. The size, placement locations, and the representation of advertisement are the critical factors that have significant impact on both the recognition effectiveness and the perceived intrusiveness. In this paper, we take advertising theory, psychology, and computational aesthetics into account to develop a novel virtual advertising mechanism, called virtual spotlighted advertising (ViSA), for tennis videos. We utilize the extraneous visual acuity of viewers while watching the attractive object, such that they are not much disturbed from the progress of the game, and at the same time, the inserted advertisement can effectively deliver its message across to them. We propose a framework and realize an exemplary system to serve ViSA. The system automatically detects the candidate insertion points in both temporal and spatial domains and estimates the most effective region for visual communication. Then, the harmonically re-colored advertisements with foveation model based non-uniform transparency, are projected onto the court. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ViSA in terms of recall and recognition. Moreover, the induced visual intrusiveness is limited by the proposed innovative representation style.