An automated refereeing and analysis tool for the four-legged league

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose an automated refereeing and analysis tool for robot soccer, This computer vision based tool can be applied for diverse tasks such as: (i) automated game refereeing, (ii) computer-based analysis of the game, and derivation of game statistics, (iii) automated annotations and semantic descriptions of the game, which could be used for the automatic generation of training data for learning complex high-level behaviors, and (iv) automatic acquisition of real game data to be used in robot soccer simulators. The most attractive application of the tool is automated refereeing. In this case, the refereeing system is built using a processing unit (standard PC) and some static and/or moving video cameras. The system can interact with the robot players and with the game controller using wireless data communication, and with the human spectators and human second referees by speech synthesis mechanisms or using visual displays. We present a refereeing and analysis system for the RoboCup Four-Legged League. This system is composed by three modules: object perception, tracking, and action analysis. The camera placement issue is solved by human controlled camera's placement and movement. Some preliminary experimental results of this system are presented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.