Camera calibration using court models for real-time augmenting soccer scenes

In this paper, we present a procedure to estimate the position, orientation and focal length of a camera in a soccer field. These parameters are then used in real-time overlay of graphics on a soccer pitch. The method uses court model composed by arcs and lines. A means of automatically initializing the tracking process is also presented which uses Hough transform with a combination of a non-linear least squares optimization method. For the tracking of camera parameters, two cases arise: the center of the pitch and the 18 m area. A combination of automatic court model recognition with the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) algorithm is also used.