3D reconstruction and enrichment of broadcast soccer video

Abstract

Recently, it has become a new trend to reconstruct sports video for various purposes. This paper presents a 3D reconstruction and enrichment system that not only reconstructs broadcast soccer video but also enriches reconstructed video with music and illustrations of the video contents. The system can reconstruct not only the goalmouth scene but also the midfield scene, which cannot be reconstructed by the existing systems. To quickly find the feature points for calibrating the camera, we propose a fast algorithm to detect the lines in the goalmouth scene and use the algorithm proposed in our previous papers to detect the partial ellipses in the midfield scene. The reconstruction is conducted on several video sequences of two scenes. The reconstructed videos eliminate the ball deformation and unnecessary camera changes through smoothing the camera parameters. This system also serves as an experimental system for our project that reconstructs the on-going soccer game in real time.