Robust Dominant Color Region Detection with Applications to Sports Video Analysis ?

This paper proposes a novel automatic dominant color region detection algorithm that is robust to temporal variations in the dominant color due to field, weather and lighting conditions throughout a sports video. The proposed algorithm uses two color spaces, a control space and a primary space. The robustness of the algorithm results from adaptation of the statistics of the dominant color in the primary space with drift protection using the control space, and fusion of the information from two spaces. We then present applications of the proposed dominant color region detection method to generic sports video processing, including shot boundary detection and shot type classification in sports video, referee and player of interest detection, and a fast algorithm for play-break event detection. The detection of referee and players of interest and their teams are achieved by a single algorithm, which uses distinguishing uniform colors of these objects. The efficiency, effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated over a dataset of various sports video, including basketball, football, golf, and soccer video.