Review on Video Refereeing using Computer Vision in Football

Football is, without a doubt, one of the biggest and most popular sports in the world with an estimated fanbase of 3.5 million individuals. England’s "Premier League" has 20 teams and each of these teams earn roughly 40 million a year just through tv broadcast sales. Add to that jersey sales, tickets and sponsorship money, one slowly begins to understand just how popular this sport is. However, it is not immune to controversy and one of the biggest problem plaguing the sport is the referral system which is inconsistent and prone to mistakes. This paper presents a system to perform the job of refereeing in the sport of football by taking an input of the live video file and using computer vision and image processing to understand what is happening. Computer Vision is the science aiming at automating the process of information extraction, analysis and understanding information from a sequence of images. It works at providing the capability of vision to a computer. The system makes decisions such as goal, foul or offside. It then conveys this message to the on field official. It does so by tracking the players and the ball and analyzing their position at every instant.