Player number recognition in soccer video using internal contours and temporal redundancy

Player identification is important task in sport video content analysis. In case of soccer video player numbers can be exploited to perform recognition. Jersey numbers can be considered as scene text and main problems in localization and recognition are low resolution, low contrast, color aliasing, unconstrained background etc. This paper proposed new method for player number localization and recognition. Firstly jersey regions are extracted using region growing algorithm. These regions are segmented using the component of HSV color space that best separates jersey and number area. Then, novel method for player number localization based on internal contours is proposed. False number candidates are discarded based on area and aspect ratio. Extracted numbers are enhanced using image smoothing and rotation normalization. We also propose algorithm that improves OCR recognition performance using temporal redundancy.

[1]  R. Cucchiara,et al.  Sports Video Annotation Using Enhanced HSV Histograms in Multimedia Ontologies , 2007, 14th International Conference of Image Analysis and Processing - Workshops (ICIAPW 2007).

[2]  Ekram Khan,et al.  SEGMENTATION AND TRACKING FOR INTERACTIVE SPORT SCENES USING REGION SPACE ANALYSIS AND A PRIORI INFORMATION , 2003 .

[3]  Alberto Del Bimbo,et al.  Matching Faces with Textual Cues in Soccer Videos , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo.

[4]  Linda G. Shapiro,et al.  Image Segmentation Techniques , 1984, Other Conferences.

[5]  Wen Gao,et al.  Jersey number detection in sports video for athlete identification , 2005, Visual Communications and Image Processing.

[6]  Anil K. Jain,et al.  Text information extraction in images and video: a survey , 2004, Pattern Recognit..

[7]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2001.

[9]  Ekram Khan,et al.  Player classification in interactive sport scenes using prior information region space analysis and number recognition , 2003, Proceedings 2003 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.03CH37429).

[10]  Alberto Del Bimbo,et al.  Player identification in soccer videos , 2005, MIR '05.

[11]  Milan Sonka,et al.  Image Processing, Analysis and Machine Vision , 1993, Springer US.

[12]  Patrick Gros,et al.  Browsing Sports Video , 2006 .