A pinhole camera modeling of motion vector field for tennis video analysis

The motion vector field (MVF) represents motion characteristics in video sequences, and has been widely used and been proved to be effective in sports video analysis. However, in tennis video analysis, MVF-based methods are seldom utilized for the reasons that: (i) the players' true motion is not accurately represented by the extracted motion vector, due to the deformation caused by the diagonal shooting of the camera; and (ii) the motion vector's magnitude is not prominent enough and is prone to be disturbed by noises. In this paper, a pinhole camera modeling of the motion vector field is proposed to revise the deformed motion vector. In this modeling, a foreground object mask is adopted and global motion compensation is incorporated as the pre-processing steps. Evaluation of the proposed modeling using four hours of tennis videos shows very encouraging results.