Multiple players tracking and identification using group detection and player number recognition in sports video

Abstract

We are interested in the problem of automatically tracking and identifying players in sports video. While there are many automatic multi-target tracking methods, in sports video, it is difficult to track multiple players due to frequent occlusions, quick motion of players and camera, and camera position. We propose tracking method that associates tracklets of a same player using results of player number recognition. To deal with frequent occlusions, we detect human region by level set method and then estimates if it is occluded group region or unoccluded individual one. Moreover, we associate tracklets using the results of player number recognition at each frame by keypoints-based matching with templates from multiple viewpoints, so that final tracklets include occluded region.