Trajectory-based ball detection and tracking with applications to semantic analysis of broadcast soccer video

Abstract

This paper first presents an improved trajectory-based algorithm for automatically detecting and tracking the ball in broadcast soccer video. Unlike the object-based algorithms, our algorithm does not evaluate whether a sole object is a ball. Instead, it evaluates whether a candidate trajectory, which is generated from the candidate feature image by a candidate verification procedure based on Kalman filter, is a ball trajectory. Secondly, a new approach for automatically analyzing broadcast soccer video is proposed, which is based on the ball trajectory. The algorithms in this approach not only improve play-break analysis and high-level semantic event detection, but also detect the basic actions and analyze team ball possession, which may not be analyzed based only on the low-level feature. Moreover, experimental results show that our ball detection and tracking algorithm can achieve above 96% accuracy for the video segments with the soccer field. Compared with the existing methods, a higher accuracy is achieved on goal detection and play-break segmentation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first solution in detecting the basic actions such as touching and passing, and analyzing the team ball possession in broadcast soccer video.