3-D camera modeling and its applications in sports broadcast video analysis

Abstract

This paper concentrates on a unified 3-D camera modeling technique, which can be applied to analyze several sports types. To this end, we have based our modeling on collecting feature points from two perpendicular planes: the ground plane and the net plane, as they exist in most court-net sports. A two-step algorithm is employed to extract and distinguish the feature lines and points from these two planes for determining the camera calibration parameters. Our proposed modeling enables a defined mapping from real 3-D scene coordinates to image coordinates. The use of this modeling helps in the improvement of many emerging applications, such as moving-player segmentation and 3-D scene adaptation. We evaluate the promising performance of the proposed modeling for a variety of court-net sports videos containing badminton, tennis and volleyball, and also demonstrate its capability on the case study of player segmentation and 3-D scene adaptation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.