Abstract
In the paper, we describe the technical details of a multi-player tracker system using tracking data obtained from a single low-cost stationary camera on field hockey games. Analyzing the tracking data of the players only from the transmitted video opens a multitude of applications that allows the cost of technology to be reduced. This method does not depend on the cooperation of the players (by using sensors) or their teams (by sharing data with a third party). The approach taken in this paper uses a variety of computer vision and tracking techniques. Making player tracking data more accessible lowers the barrier to entry for sports research and increases the period during which advanced analysis methods can be applied. The proposed system runs the full pipeline at 3 fps on a computer with a simple graphics card.
This work was funded by the DAIQUIRI project, cofunded by imec, a research institute founded by the Flemish Government. Project partners are Ghent University, InTheRace, Arinti, Cronos, VideoHouse, NEP Belgium, and VRT, with project support from VLAIO under grant number HBC.2019.0053.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Yurko, R., et al.: Going deep: models for continuous-time within-play valuation of game outcomes in American football with tracking data. J. Quant. Anal. Sports 16(2), 163–182 (2020)
Sabirin, H., Sankoh, H., Naito, S.: Automatic soccer player tracking in single camera with robust occlusion handling using attribute matching. IEICE Trans. Inf. Syst. 98(8), 1580–1588 (2015)
Linke, D., Link, D., Lames, M.: Football-specific validity of TRACAB’s optical video tracking systems. PloS one 15(3), e0230179 (2020)
Zheng, S., Yue, Y., Hobbs, J.: Generating long-term trajectories using deep hierarchical networks arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07138, 2017
Macdonald, B.: Recreating the game: using player tracking data to analyze dynamics in basketball and football. In: Harvard Data Science Review, vol. 2, no. 4 (2020)
Vovk, V., Skuratovskyi, S., Vyplavin, P., Gorovyi, I.: Light-weight tracker for sports applications. Signal Process. Symposium (SPSympo). IEEE 2019, 251–255 (2019)
Felzenszwalb, P., McAllester, D., Ramanan, D.: A discriminatively trained, multiscale, deformable part model. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, vol. 2008 pp. 1–8. IEEE (2008)
Lu, W.-L., Ting, J.-A., Little, J.J., Murphy, K.P.: Learning to track and identify players from broadcast sports videos. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 35(7), 1704–1716 (2013)
Cheshire, E., Halasz, C., Perin, J.K.: Player tracking and analysis of basketball plays. In: European Conference of Computer Vision (2013)
Csanalosi, G., Dobreff, G., Pasic, A., Molnar, M., Toka, L.: Low-cost optical tracking of soccer players. In: Brefeld, U., Davis, J., Van Haaren, J., Zimmermann, A. (eds.) MLSA 2020. CCIS, vol. 1324, pp. 28–39. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64912-8_3
Wojke, N., Bewley, A., Paulus, D.: Simple online and realtime tracking with a deep association metric. In: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), vol.2017, pp. 3645–3649. IEEE (2017)
Ning, G., Zhang, Z., Huang, C., Ren, X., Wang, H., Cai, C., He, Z.: Spatially supervised recurrent convolutional neural networks for visual object tracking. In: IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), vol. 2017, pp. 1–4. IEEE (2017)
Khan, G., Tariq, Z., Khan, M.U.G.:Multi-person tracking based on faster R-CNN and deep appearance features. In: Visual Object Tracking with Deep Neural Networks. IntechOpen (2019)
Komorowski, J., Kurzejamski, G., Sarwas, G.: Footandball: integrated player and ball detector arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.05445 (2019)
Tong, X., Liu, J., Wang, T., Zhang, Y.: Automatic player labeling, tracking and field registration and trajectory mapping in broadcast soccer video. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. (TIST) 2(2), 1–32 (2011)
Gu, L., Ding, X., Hua, X.-S.: Online play segmentation for broadcasted American football TV programs. In: Aizawa, K., Nakamura, Y., Satoh, S. (eds.) PCM 2004. LNCS, vol. 3331, pp. 57–64. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30541-5_8
Hung, M.-H., Hsieh, C.-H., Kuo, C.-M., Pan, J.-S.: Generalized playfield segmentation of sport videos using color features. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 32(7), 987–1000 (2011)
Homayounfar, N., Fidler, S., Urtasun, R.: Sports field localization via deep structured models. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 5212–5220 (2017)
Leal-Taixé, L., Canton-Ferrer, C., Schindler, K.: Learning by tracking: Siamese CNN for robust target association. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, pp. 33–40 (2016)
Schulter, S. Vernaza, P. Choi, W. Chandraker, M.: Deep network flow for multi-object tracking. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 6951–6960 (2017)
Sharma, S., Ansari, J.A. Murthy, J.K., Krishna, K.M.: Beyond pixels: leveraging geometry and shape cues for online multi-object tracking. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 3508–3515. IEEE (2018)
Fang, K., Xiang, Y., Li, X., Savarese, S.: Recurrent autoregressive networks for online multi-object tracking. In: 2018 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), pp. 466–475. IEEE (2018)
Xu, Y., Zhou, X., Chen, S., Li, F.: Deep learning for multiple object tracking: a survey. IET Comput. Vis. 13(4), 355–368 (2019)
Fu, H., Wu, L., Jian, M., Yang, Y., Wang, X.: MF-SORT: simple online and realtime tracking with motion features. In: Zhao, Y., Barnes, N., Chen, B., Westermann, R., Kong, X., Lin, C. (eds.) ICIG 2019. LNCS, vol. 11901, pp. 157–168. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34120-6_13
Ciaparrone, G., Sánchez, F.L., Tabik, S., Troiano, L., Tagliaferri, R., Herrera, F.: Deep learning in video multi-object tracking: a survey. Neurocomputing 381, 61–88 (2020)
Nasseri, M.H., Moradi, H., Hosseini, R., Babaee, M.: Simple online and real-time tracking with occlusion handling arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.04147 (2021)
Bewley, A., Ge, Z., Ott, L., Ramos, F., Upcroft, B.: Simple online and realtime tracking. In: IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), vol. 2016, pp. 3464–3468. IEEE (2016)
Bochinski, E., Eiselein, V., Sikora, T.: High-speed tracking-by-detection without using image information. In: 2017 14th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (AVSS), pp. 1–6. IEEE (2017)
Manafifard, M., Ebadi, H., Moghaddam, H.A.: A survey on player tracking in soccer videos. Comput. Vis. Image Understand. 159, 19–46 (2017)
Murray, S.: Real-time multiple object tracking-a study on the importance of speed arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.03572 (2017)
Berclaz, J., Fleuret, F., Turetken, E., Fua, P.: Multiple object tracking using k-shortest paths optimization. IEEE Trans. pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 33(9), 1806–1819 (2011)
Liang, Q., Wu, W., Yang, Y., Zhang, R., Peng, Y., Xu, M.: Multi-player tracking for multi-view sports videos with improved k-shortest path algorithm. Appl. Sci. 10(3), 864 (2020)
Kwon, J., Lee, K.M.: Tracking by sampling trackers. In: 2011 International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 1195–1202. IEEE (2011)
Valmadre, J., Bertinetto, L., Henriques, J., Vedaldi, A., Torr, P.H.: End-to-end representation learning for correlation filter based tracking. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and pattern Recognition, pp. 2805–2813 (2017)
Shitrit, H.B., Berclaz, J., Fleuret, F., Fua, P.: Tracking multiple people under global appearance constraints. In: International Conference on Computer Vision, vol. 2011, pp. 137–144. IEEE (2011)
Kang, T., Mo, Y., Pae, D., Ahn, C., Lim, M.: Robust visual tracking framework in the presence of blurring by arbitrating appearance-and feature-based detection. Measurement 95, 50–69 (2017)
Liu, J.: Carr, P., Collins, R.T., Liu, Y.: Tracking sports players with context-conditioned motion models. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1830–1837 (2013)
Li, Z., Gao, S., Nai, K.: Robust object tracking based on adaptive templates matching via the fusion of multiple features. J. Vis. Commun. Image Represent. 44, 1–20 (2017)
Szeliski, R.: Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications. Springer, London (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-935-0
He, K., Gkioxari, G., Dollár, P., Girshick, R.: Mask R-CNN. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision, pp. 2961–2969 (2017)
Abdulla, W.:Mask R-CNN for object detection and instance segmentation on Keras and TensorFlow (2017). https://github.com/matterport/Mask_RCNN
Schubert, E., Sander, J., Ester, M., Kriegel, H.P., Xu, X.: DBSCAN revisited, revisited: why and how you should (still) use DBSCAN. ACM Trans. Database Syst. (TODS) 42(3), 1–21 (2017)
Ester, M., Kriegel, H.-P., Sander, J., Xu, X., et al.: A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases with noise. KDD 96(34), 226–231 (1996)
Kuhn, H.W.: The Hungarian method for the assignment problem. Naval Res. Logistic. Q. 2(1–2), 83–97 (1955)
Munkres, J.: Algorithms for the assignment and transportation problems. J. Soc. Ind. Appl. Math. 5(1), 32–38 (1957)
Zhou, X., Koltun, V., Krähenbühl, P.: Tracking objects as points. In: Vedaldi, A., Bischof, H., Brox, T., Frahm, J.-M. (eds.) ECCV 2020. LNCS, vol. 12349, pp. 474–490. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58548-8_28
Ultralytics: YOLOv5 in PyTorch, January 2021. https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5/tree/v4.0
Lin, T.-Y., et al.: Coco common object in context - 2017 dataset. https://cocodataset.org/
Long, J., Shelhamer, E., Darrell, T.: Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 3431–3440 (2015)
Shah, M.P.: Semantic segmentation architectures implemented in pytorch (2017). https://github.com/meetshah1995/pytorch-semseg
He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., Sun, J.: Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 770–778 (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Duarte Moura, H. et al. (2022). Low Cost Player Tracking in Field Hockey. In: Brefeld, U., Davis, J., Van Haaren, J., Zimmermann, A. (eds) Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics. MLSA 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1571. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02044-5_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02044-5_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-02043-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-02044-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)