Online Multiplayer Tracking by Extracting Temporal Contexts with Transformer

Sports competition is one of the most popular programs for many audiences. Tracking the players in sports game videos from broadcasts is a nontrivial challenge for computer vision researchers. In sports videos, the direction of an athlete’s movement changes quickly and unpredictably. Mutual occlusion between athletes is also more frequent in team competitions. However, the rich temporal contexts among the adjacent frames have been excluded from consideration. To address this dilemma, we propose an online transformer-based learnable framework in an end-to-end fashion. We use a transformer architecture to extract the temporal contexts between the successive frames and add them to the network training, which is robust to occlusion and complex direction changes in multiplayer tracking. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three sports video datasets by comparing them with recently advanced multiplayer trackers.