Robust Methods and Representations for Soccer Player Tracking and Collision Resolution

We present a method of tracking multiple players in a soccer match using video taken from a single fixed camera with pan, tilt and zoom. We extract a single mosaic of the playing field and robustly derive its homography to a playing field model, based on color information, line extraction, and a Hausdorff distance measure. Players are identified by color and shape, and tracked in the image mosaic space using a Kalman filter. The frequent occlusions of multiple players are resolved using a novel representation acted on by a rule-based method, which recognizes differences between removable and intrinsic ambiguities. We test the methods with synthetic and real data.