A Player-Possession Acquisition System for Broadcast Soccer Video

A semi-auto system is developed to acquire player possession for broadcast soccer video, whose objective is to minimize the manual work. This research is important because acquiring player-possession by pure manual work is very time-consuming. For completeness, this system integrates the ball detection-and-tracking algorithm, view classification algorithm, and play/break analysis algorithm. First, it produces the ball locations, play/break structure, and the view classes of frames. Then it finds the touching points based on ball locations and player detection. Next it estimates the touching-place in the field for each touching point based on the view-class of the touching frame. Last, for each touching-point it acquires the touching-player candidates based on the touching-place and the roles of players. The system provides the graphical user interfaces to verify touching-points and finalize the touching-player for each touching-point. Experimental results show that the proposed system can obtain good results in touching-point detection and touching-player candidate inference, which save a lot of time compared with the pure manual way.