Tracking soccer players using broadcast TV images

Tracking soccer players using broadcast TV images is a challenging problem because of players' quick movements, occlusion, and camera movements. This paper presents a framework to track multiple players using the temporal spatio-velocity (TSV) transform. The TSV transform is a combination of a windowing process and the Hough transform. We have previously introduced the TSV transform to extract velocity-stable blobs using binary image sequences. In this paper, we extend the transform to apply to grayscale or color images in order to track object textures. We also increase the computational performance of the TSV transform by setting a computational window around the blob being tracked. This operation, which we call the "local TSV transform ", maintains the computational window at the center of the tracked object and provides an alternate means of tracking when players become occluded, a common problem in broadcast TV images. The performance of the system on a soccer video is demonstrated.