Court Reconstruction for Camera Calibration in Broadcast Basketball Videos

We introduce a technique of calibrating camera motions in basketball videos. Our method particularly transforms player positions to standard basketball court coordinates and enables applications such as tactical analysis and semantic basketball video retrieval. To achieve a robust calibration, we reconstruct the panoramic basketball court from a video, followed by warping the panoramic court to a standard one. As opposed to previous approaches, which individually detect the court lines and corners of each video frame, our technique considers all video frames simultaneously to achieve calibration; hence, it is robust to illumination changes and player occlusions. To demonstrate the feasibility of our technique, we present a stroke-based system that allows users to retrieve basketball videos. Our system tracks player trajectories from broadcast basketball videos. It then rectifies the trajectories to a standard basketball court by using our camera calibration method. Consequently, users can apply stroke queries to indicate how the players move in gameplay during retrieval. The main advantage of this interface is an explicit query of basketball videos so that unwanted outcomes can be prevented. We show the results in Figs. 1, 7, 9, 10 and our accompanying video to exhibit the feasibility of our technique.