Semantic event detection is an active and interesting research topic in the field of video mining. The major challenge is the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantics. In this chapter, we will advance a new sports video mining framework where a hybrid generative-discriminative approach is used for event detection. Specifically, we propose a three-layer semantic space by which event detection is converted into two inter-related statistical inference procedures that involve semantic analysis at different levels. The first is to infer the mid-level semantic structures from the low-level visual features via generative models, which can serve as building blocks of high-level semantic analysis. The second is to detect high-level semantics from mid-level semantic structures using discriminative models, which are of direct interests to users. In this framework we can explicitly represent and detect semantics at different levels. The use of generative and discriminative approaches in two different stages is proved to be effective and appropriate for event detection in sports video. The experimental results from a set of American football video data demonstrate that the proposed framework offers promising results compared with traditional approaches.
