Tracking soccer players aiming their kinematical motion analysis

In this work, we consider the problem of tracking players, during a soccer game, through the use of multiple cameras. The main goal here consists in finding the position of the players on the pitch at each instance of time. The tracking is performed through a graph representation in which the nodes correspond to the blobs obtained by image segmentation and the edges, weighted using the blobs information and trajectory in the image sequence, represent the distance between nodes. We present a new way of trating occlusions by splitting segmented blobs based on morphological operators and a backward and forward graph representation which allows an increasing in the number of frames automatically tracked. Unlike other works in which the analysis of short video sequences is presented, this paper illustrates the tracking results for all the players during a whole game. 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.