Sports activities play a crucial role in preserving our health and mind. Due to the rapid growth of sports video repositories, automatized classification has become essential for easy access and retrieval, content-based recommendations, contextual advertising, etc. Traditional Bangladeshi sport is a genre of sports that bears the cultural significance of Bangladesh. Classification of this genre can act as a catalyst in reviving their lost dignity. In this paper, the Deep Learning method is utilized to classify traditional Bangladeshi sports videos by extracting both the spatial and temporal features from the videos. In this regard, a new Traditional Bangladeshi Sports Video (TBSV) dataset is constructed containing five classes: Boli Khela, Kabaddi, Lathi Khela, Kho Kho, and Nouka Baich. A key contribution of this paper is to develop a scratch model by incorporating the two most prominent deep learning algorithms: convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short term memory (LSTM). Moreover, the transfer learning approach with the fine-tuned VGG19 and LSTM is used for TBSV classification. Furthermore, the proposed model is assessed over four challenging datasets: KTH, UCF-11, UCF-101, and UCF Sports. This model outperforms some recent works on these datasets while showing 99% average accuracy on the TBSV dataset.
Towards Universal and Statistical-Driven Heuristics for Automatic Classification of Sports Video Events