Flast identification of player position in soccer broadcast video by block-based camera view angle search

We propose a way of quickly and automatically identifying the positions of players in soccer broadcast video. The approach is based on fast specification of camera view angles corresponding to frame pictures by using a ldquoblock-based searchrdquo. Our method can decide on a camera view angle that corresponds to a frame picture by making block-based connections for how to allocate ldquoline-blocksrdquo, i.e., block images on field lines, between the frame picture and the soccer field space. We can obtain the position of the players by projecting the ldquoplayer-blockrdquo positions to the soccer field space along the appropriate camera view angle specified by the search. Our method can be used to make these processes faster than conventional ones that are based on computationally expensive processing such as line extraction by Hough transform. The proposal is evaluated from the aspects of both accuracy and computational cost by experiments using soccer broadcast videos.