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Real-time camera tracking using sports pitch markings

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Abstract

When broadcasting sports events such as football, it is useful to be able to place virtual annotations on the pitch, to indicate things such as distances between players and the goal, or whether a player is offside. This requires the camera position, orientation, and focal length to be estimated in real time, so that the graphics can be rendered to match the camera view. Whilst this can be achieved by using sensors on the camera mount and lens, they can be impractical or expensive to install, and often the broadcaster only has access to the video feed itself. This paper presents a method for computing the position, orientation and focal length of a camera in real time, using image analysis. The method uses markings on the pitch, such as arcs and lines, to compute the camera pose. A novel feature of the method is the use of multiple images to improve the accuracy of the camera position estimate. A means of automatically initialising the tracking process is also presented, which makes use of a modified form of Hough transform. The paper shows how a carefully chosen set of algorithms can provide fast, robust and accurate tracking for this real-world application.

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Acknowledgements

This work was carried out as a part of the EU-funded IST project MATRIS [9]. The author would like to thank his colleagues at BBC Research, BBC Sport, and the team at Red Bee Media Ltd., for helpful discussions and the provision of test data.

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  1. BBC Research, Kingswood Warren, Tadworth, Surrey, UK

    Graham Thomas

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  1. Graham Thomas
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Correspondence to Graham Thomas.

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Thomas, G. Real-time camera tracking using sports pitch markings. J Real-Time Image Proc 2, 117–132 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-007-0041-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-007-0041-1

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