A Fast Snake-Based Method to Track Football Player

We present in this paper a new method to track moving objects. It is based on snakes or active contour models. We are concerned with football game analysis and so the moving objects tracked are representing football 'players. The camera is moving too. Our active contour algorithm does not need any preprocessing step contrary to most of the snake-based methods. It is based on classical energies used in active contour algorithms but also on a balloon energy in order to reduce the contour to fit the tracked object. The tracking step does not include any position prediction and is based on a snake initialisation followed by snake deformation. The method implemented is fast enough to consider a real-time framework and has been successfully tested on football game image sequences.