Title: Playfield registration in broadcast soccer video

Authors: Xiaofeng Tong, Wenlong Li, Tao Wang, Yimin Zhang

Addresses: Intel China Research Center, 100190, Beijing China. ' Intel China Research Center, 100190, Beijing China. ' Intel China Research Center, 100190, Beijing China. ' Intel China Research Center, 100190, Beijing China

Abstract: In this paper, we present a method to conduct playfield registration for ball and player trajectory mapping in soccer videos. The task is to find the geometric correspondence between a screen image plane and the standard playfield model, and then map the ball and players from the image plane to the field model. We firstly learn the video dominant colour, and use it to extract the field region. Then apply Hough transform to detect lines and extract their intersection points. If the number of intersection points is big enough (>=4), we use direct way to estimate the homography mapping matrix. Otherwise, we apply indirect way that reconstructs the mapping matrix by taking motion between adjacent frames as transition factor. We tested the method on thousands of frames in FIFA World Cup 2006 videos, and demonstrated the method is practicable and robust in cases player occlusion and moderate camera motion.

Keywords: sports video analysis; playfield registration; camera calibration; homography matrix; ball trajectory mapping; soccer videos; player trajectory mapping; football videos; screen image plane; playfield modelling; Hough transform; FIFA World Cup 2006; player occlusion; camera motion.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMIS.2010.036071

International Journal of Multimedia Intelligence and Security, 2010 Vol.1 No.2, pp.120 - 138

Published online: 17 Oct 2010 *

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