Person tracking for ambient camera selection in complex sports environments

As pervasive computing technologies are gradually penetrating sport, we are witnessing a proliferating number of research systems that can track athletes during training and/or in competition. Indeed, athlete tracking is a particularly challenging research tasks, which is also a key enabler for a wide range of applications such as ambient personalized broadcasting. In this paper we survey person tracking systems for sport applications and illustrate their limitations for realistic sports environments. As a real-life example we present the robust and high-performance person tracking system developed at the Athens Information Technology, and explain its inability to deal with occlusions, interlacing, adverse and changing light conditions and mostly the strain of the athletes, which are very common in high activity athletic scenes. We also present techniques for dealing with these challenges, along with an architecture for building ambient camera selection environments for broadcasting purposes. These techniques form the basis for the person tracking and ambient camera selection systems that are developed in the scope of the my-e-Director 2012 EC project, which is working towards a realistic prototype system for the London 2012 Olympics.