Tracking People in Sport: Making Use of Partially Controlled Environment

Many different methods for tracking humans were proposed in the past several years, yet surprisingly only a few authors examined the accuracy of the proposed systems. As the accuracy analysis is impossible without the well-defined ground truth, some kind of at least partially controlled environment is needed. Analysis of an athlete motion in sport match is well suited for that purpose, and it coincides with the need of the sport research community for accurate and reliable results of motion acquisition. This paper presents a development of a two-camera people tracker, incorporating two complementary tracking algorithms. The developed system is suited for simultaneously tracking several people on a large area of a handball court, using a sequence of 384-by-288 pixel images from fixed cameras. We also examine the level of accuracy that this kind of computer vision system setup is capable of.

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