Player Localization and Tracking in Field Model Space using Graph Representation in Football Broadcast Videos

Precise player localization is the key step for improved analysis such as player tracking in soccer broadcast videos. Extracting player trajectories provides some essencial information for coaches and sport experts to determine weaknesses and strengths of the players and the team and to evaluate overall strategy of the game. As far as previous scenes are missed by camera motion, continuous player trajectory could be depicted by trajectory extraction on constructed mosaic. The goal of this paper is to transform player position to the field model and extract all trajectories in both image and model spaces. Therefore, players are detected using Gaussian Mixture Model and Gentle Adaboost. After removing extra regions such as goal post and lines, isolating occluded players, player labeling and transforming player positions to the same coordinate system, player tracking is carried out. Finally, the proposed player detection and tracking methods are applied for 78 frames taken from six soccer sequences.