Effective tracking of the players and ball in indoor soccer games in the presence of occlusion

Object tracking is one of the major subjects in machine vision and plays a main role in detection of major events in indoor soccer matches. In this paper, a novel approach for tracking the ball and players is proposed. In this method, the ground lines are segmented and eliminated using a fast and effective method. Then, the remaining non-field pixels are considered and labeled as players and the ball. A fast level set contour is used to track players and the ball. The proposed method can track players and the ball in presence of occlusion. Experiments show that the proposed method is robust to occlusion and different field colors.