A Real Time Ball Detection Framework For Soccer Video

Despite a lot of research efforts, it is still challenging to detect the ball in soccer video, especially in long shot frames. In this paper, we propose a novel real time ball detection framework for broadcast soccer video in long shot frames. Firstly each frame of the video is preprocessed to remove the regions outside ground field and build a saliency binary map. Then, the ball candidates are detected and examined by a rule-based algorithm proposed in this paper. At last, making use of Kalman filter as an effective supplement, the ball location is decided. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is quite effective to recognize the ball.