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 twostage
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-viewstage, 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.