Automatic Analysis of Activities in Sports Arenas Using Thermal Cameras

The demand for automatically gathered data is a societal trend quickly extending to all aspects of human life. Knowledge on the utilization of public facilities is of interest for optimising use and cutting expenses for the owners. Manual observations are both cumbersome and expensive, and they have a risk of incorrect results due to subjective opinions or lack of interest in the given task. In this paper we present the main results of a 5-year long research project revolving around the real-world application of automatic analysis of activities in sports arenas. Three topics are explored: Counting people, recognising activities, and estimating energy expenditure. The project is based on thermal image data, to preserve privacy while capturing video in public sports arenas. This paper aim to provide an overview of our published methods and results within these three topics and add a discussion of the results and perspectives of this research.