Fast camera calibration for the analysis of sport sequences

Semantic analysis of sport sequences requires camera calibration to obtain player and ball positions in real-world coordinates. For court sports like tennis, the marker lines on the field can be used to determine the calibration parameters. We propose a real-time calibration algorithm that can be applied to all court sports simply by exchanging the court model. The algorithm is based on (1) a specialized court-line detector, (2) a RANSAC-based line parameter estimation, (3) a combinatorial optimization step to localize the court within the set of detected line segments, and (4) an iterative court-model tracking step. Our results show real-time calibration of, e.g., tennis and soccer sequences with a computation time of only about 6 ms per frame.