Tracking When the Camera Looks Away

Tracking players in sports videos presents numerous challenges due to weak distinguishing features and unpredictable motion. Considerable work has been done to track players in such videos using a combination of appearance and motion modeling, mostly in continuous streams of video. However, in a broadcast sports video, having advertisements, replays and intermittent change of camera view, it becomes a challenging task to keep track of players over an entire game. In this work, we solve a novel problem of tracking over a sequence of temporally disjoint soccer videos without the use of appearance cue, using a Graph based optimization approach. Each team is represented by a graph, in which the nodes correspond to player positions and the edge weights depend on spatial inter-player distance. We use team formation to associate tracks between clips and provide an end-to-end system that is able to perform statistical and tactical analysis of the game. We also introduce a new challenging dataset of an international soccer game.