Sports Ball & Player Detection

Players and Ball Detection in Broadcasting Soccer Videos

This page contains my past work of object detection from sports video content in the project "Object Highlighting for Mobile Video" at Thomson Corporate Research, Princeton.

Abstract:

Players and the ball in soccer video are supposed to inside the grass play field. A shape analysis-based approach is put forward to identify the players and the ball from the roughly extracted foregrounds which are obtained by a learned color histogram-based playfield detector and connected component analysis. Euclidean distance transform is employed to extract skeletons for every foreground blobs, and then skeleton analysis is performed to remove false alarms (non-players and non-ball) and cut-off the artifacts (mostly due to playfield lines) based on skeleton pruning and reverse Euclidean distance transform.