Automatic mixing and tracking of on-pitch football action for television broadcasts

For the television broadcast of football in Europe, the sound engineer will typically have an arrangement of 12 shotgun microphones around the pitch to pick up on-pitch sounds such as whistle blows, players talking and ball kicks etc. Typically, during a match, the sound engineer will increase and decrease the levels of these microphones manually in accordance with where the action is on the pitch at a given time to prevent the final mix being awash with crowd noise. As part of the EU funded project, FascinatE, we have developed an automatic mixing algorithm that intelligently seeks key events on the pitch and turns on the corresponding microphones, the algorithm picks out the key events and automatically tracks the action eliminating the need for manual tracking