# Audio for Sports Highlight Detection: A Comparative Empirical Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17923/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [AST: Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01778/) (2021)
- [Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13874/) (2023)
- [SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04527/) (2018)
- [UMT: Unified Multi-modal Transformers for Joint Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12745/) (2022)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [Music Source Separation in the Waveform Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13254/) (2019)
- [TRACE: Temporal Grounding Video LLM via Causal Event Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05643/) (2024)
- [TR-DETR: Task-Reciprocal Transformer for Joint Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02309/) (2024)
- [MH-DETR: Video Moment and Highlight Detection with Cross-modal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00355/) (2023)
- [Saliency-Guided DETR for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01615/) (2024)
- [MS-DETR: Towards Effective Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection by Joint Motion-Semantic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12062/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Modality-Transferable Video Highlight Detection with Representation Activation Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09401/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Video Highlight Detection by Learning from Audio and Visual Recurrence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13933/) (2024)
- [Automated Detection of Sport Highlights from Audio and Video Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16100/) (2025)
- [SoccerHigh: A Benchmark Dataset for Automatic Soccer Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01439/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Adaptation for Video Highlight Detection Using Meta-Auxiliary Learning and Cross-Modality Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04924/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sports highlight detection aims to identify the most exciting and meaningful moments from long sports videos. While existing methods often emphasize visual or visual-language representations, sports videos contain rich audio cues, including commentator speech, crowd reactions, whistles, ball impacts, and referee calls. In this work, we revisit the role of audio in sports highlight detection and ask a simple question: how far can audio alone go? We construct lightweight audio-only baselines using pretrained audio representations and compare them with visual-only and audio-visual methods on the SV-Highlights benchmark. Surprisingly, our audio-only GRU baseline achieves strong performance and outperforms several existing audio-visual methods under our supervised evaluation setting. Furthermore, a simple audio-visual fusion baseline achieves the best performance across all metrics, indicating that audio and visual cues provide complementary information. To better understand the contribution of audio, we conduct source-separated analysis and show that vocal/commentary audio is more informative than background-only audio, while their combination performs best. We also analyze interpretable audio cues and find that highlight clips exhibit higher RMS loudness, peak loudness, and mid-frequency energy than non-highlight clips, although substantial distribution overlap indicates that loudness alone is insufficient. Our findings suggest that audio is an underexplored but highly informative modality for sports highlight detection and should be treated as a primary signal rather than merely an auxiliary cue.