Hierarchical Model-Based Human Motion Tracking Via Unscented Kalman Filter

This paper presents a computer vision system for tracking high-speed non-rigid skaters over a large playing area in short track speeding skating competitions. The outputs of the tracking system are spatio-temporal trajectories of the players which can be further processed and analyzed by sport experts. Given very fast and non-smooth camera motions to capture highly complex and dynamic scenes of skating, tracking amorphous skaters should be a challenging task. We propose a new method of (1) automatically computing the transformation matrices to map each frame of the imagery to the globally consistent model of the rink and (2) incorporating the hierarchical model based on the contextual knowledge and multiple cues into the unscented Kalman filter to improve the tracking performance when occlusion occurs. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is very efficient and effective on video recorded live by the authors in the World Short Track Speed Skating Championships.