Trajectory-based ball detection and tracking with aid of homography in broadcast tennis video

Ball-detection-and-tracking in broadcast tennis video (BTV) is a crucial but challenging task in tennis video semantics analysis. Informally, the challenges are due to camera motion and the other causes such as the presence of many ball-like objects and the small size of the tennis ball. The trajectory-based approach proposed by us in our previous papers mainly counteracted the challenges imposed by causes other than camera motion and achieves a good performance. This paper proposes an improved trajectory-based ball detection and tracking algorithm in BTV with the aid of homography, which counteracts the challenges caused by camera motion and bring us multiple new merits. Firstly, it acquires an accurate homography, which transforms each frame into the "standard" frame. Secondly, it achieved higher accuracy of ball identification. Thirdly, it obtains the ball projection position in the real world, instead of ball location in the image. Lastly, it also identifies landing frames and positions of the ball. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm can obtain not only higher accuracy in ball identification and in ball position alike, but also ball landing frames and positions. With the intent of using homography to improve the video-based event detection for smart home we also do some experiments on acquiring the homography for home surveillance video.