Tracking Multiple Sports Players for Mobile Display

An architecture system and a method for tracking people are presented for sports applications. The system’s input is video data from static camera and the output is the real world, real-time positions of the players during a sport event. This output can be used for lowbandwidth match play animations for web or wireless display, and for analysis of fitness and tactics of the teams and players. Firstly, an efficient real-time background modeling and maintenance is described based on the segmentation of input images into stationary and nonstationary blocks. In order to detect foreground objects a method based on background subtraction is implemented, using chromaticity and lightness, with the intention of avoiding shadows and jitters. Object tracking is achieved using a cost function of blob information such as the centroid coordinates, the covered area, the velocity and the color. A condensation filter is also implemented in order to cope with complex cases such as when regions enter/exit the scene and when they can be occluded by other regions. The results of the proposed methods, the players’ location and trajectories are presented and discussed.