Occupancy Analysis of Sports Arenas using Thermal Imaging

This paper presents a system for automatic analysis of the occupancy of sports arenas. By using a thermal camera for image capturing the number of persons and their location on the court are found without violating any privacy issues. The images are binarised with an automatic threshold method. Reflections due to shiny surfaces are eliminated by analysing symmetric patterns. Occlusions are dealt with through a concavity analysis of the binary regions. The system is tested in five different sports arenas, for more than three full weeks altogether. These tests showed that after a short initialisation routine the system operates independent of the different environments. The system can very precisely distinguish between zero, some or many persons on the court and give a good indication of which parts of the court that has been used.