Playfield registration in broadcast soccer video
Xiaofeng Tong, Wenlong Li, Tao Wang, Yimin Zhang · International Journal of Multimedia Intelligence and Security · 2010
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.