Making CNNs for Video Parsing Accessible
This work addresses accessibility for small e-sport tournament organizers by making event extraction from gameplay videos less computationally demanding, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackled the problem of making CNN-based video parsing for e-sport games more accessible by reducing computational resources and time, achieving results that outperform standard backpropagation baselines in DOTA2.
The ability to extract sequences of game events for high-resolution e-sport games has traditionally required access to the game's engine. This serves as a barrier to groups who don't possess this access. It is possible to apply deep learning to derive these logs from gameplay video, but it requires computational power that serves as an additional barrier. These groups would benefit from access to these logs, such as small e-sport tournament organizers who could better visualize gameplay to inform both audience and commentators. In this paper we present a combined solution to reduce the required computational resources and time to apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract events from e-sport gameplay videos. This solution consists of techniques to train a CNN faster and methods to execute predictions more quickly. This expands the types of machines capable of training and running these models, which in turn extends access to extracting game logs with this approach. We evaluate the approaches in the domain of DOTA2, one of the most popular e-sports. Our results demonstrate our approach outperforms standard backpropagation baselines.