Multi-camera video surveillance for real-time analysis and reconstruction of soccer games

Soccer analysis and reconstruction is one of the most interesting challenges for wide-area video surveillance applications. Techniques and system implementation for tracking the ball and players with multiple stationary cameras are discussed. With video data captured from a football stadium, the real-world, real-time positions of the ball and players can be generated. The whole system contains a two-stage workflow, i.e., single view and multi-view processing. The first stage includes categorizing of players and filtering of the ball after changing detection against an adaptive background and image-plane tracking. Occlusion reasoning and tracking-back is applied for robust ball filtering. In the multi-view stage, multiple observations from overlapped single views are fused to refine players' positions and to estimate 3-D ball positions using geometric constraints. Experimental results on real data from long sequences are demonstrated.