Tracking soccer players based on homography among multiple views

In this paper, we propose a method of tracking soccer players using multiple views. As many researches have done on soccer scene analysis by using trajectories of the players and the soccer ball, it is desirable to track soccer players robustly. Soccer player tracking enables strategy analysis, scene recovery, making scenes for broadcasting, and automatic system of the camera control. However, soccer is a sport that occlusion occurs in many cases, and tracking often fails by the occlusion of the players. It is difficult to track the players by using a single camera alone. Therefore, we use multiple view images to avoid the occlusion problem, so that we can obtain robustness in player tracking. As a first step, inner-camera operation is performed independently in each camera to track the players. In any case that players can not be tracked in the camera, inter-camera operation is performed as a second step. Tracking information of all cameras are integrated by using the geometrical relationship between cameras called homography. Inter-camera operation makes it possible to get the location of the player who is not detected in the image, who is occluded by the other player, and who is outside the angle of view. Experimental results show that robust player tracking is available by taking advantage of using multiple cameras.