Soccer video analysis by ball, player and referee tracking
Wayne Chelliah Naidoo, Jules‐Raymond Tapamo · 2006
Soccer ball detection and tracking plays a pivotal role in soccer event detection. In fact, all events in the game take place around the ball, and it is crucial to track the movement of the ball, players of both teams as well as the referee in order to perform analysis of the match both real-time and post match. A ball, player and referee detection, classification and tracking; team identification, and a field extraction approach is proposed in this paper. A higher level automatic offside event (OE) detection method is also proposed. The principle constraint considered during the development of the system was that the pattern recognition techniques had to be computationally efficient in terms of processing time. The system developed is a non-invasive vision-based decision support tool, capable of providing real-time analysis of a soccer match, including assisting the referee in making a decision concerning the offside rule.