Player identification in interactive sport scenes using region space analysis prior information and number recognition

This paper proposes using a novel region space technique to track sport persons for the purpose of extracting their shirt numbers and use this to provide augmented information to the viewer. The region adjacency graph and picture trees are used to perform a search for an object using prior knowledge from a scene description. Once the candidate object has been extracted the sub-space is examined for alphanumeric characters, which are then characterized by optical character recognition. Rogue candidates may be removed based on the recognition histograms with improved robustness using temporal analysis. The recognized sport person is accentuated using graphical overlays from a database.