A ball detection algorithm for real soccer image sequences

A large number of methods for circle detection has been studied in the last years for numerous image processing applications. The application domain considered in this paper is the soccer game. To identify the ball in soccer images is very important in order to evaluate the goal event. This domain is challenging as a great number of problems has to be managed, such as occlusions, shadows, objects similar to the ball, real time processing. The aim of this work is to present the results of a number of experiments obtained by using a modified version of the directional circle Hough transform. Different lighting conditions have been considered since they introduce strong modifications on the appearance of the ball in the image: when the image sequences are taken with natural light the ball appears as a spherical cap then the search of the ball has been modified in order to manage those situations. A large number of experiments has been carried out showing that the proposed method obtains an high detection score.