Paper Info
Title
Ball Tracking and Virtual Replays for Innovative Tennis Broadcasts
Abstract
This paper presents a real-time computer vision system that tracks the motion of a tennis ball in 3D using multiple cameras. Ball tracking enables virtual replays, new game statistics, and other visualizations, which result in very new ways of experiencing and analyzing tennis matches. The system has been used in international television broadcasts and webcasts of more than 15 matches. Six cameras around a stadium, divided into four pairs, are currently used to track the ball on serves, which sometimes exceed speeds of 225 kmph. A multi-threaded approach is taken to tracking where each thread tracks the ball in a pair of cameras based on motion, intensity and shape, performs stereo matching to obtain the 3D trajectory, detects when a ball goes out of view of its camera pair, and initializes and triggers a subsequent thread. This efficient approach is scalable to many more cameras tracking multiple objects. The ready acceptance of the system indicates the growing potential for multi-camera based real-time tracking in broadcast applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2000
10.1109/ICPR.2000.902885
ICPR
Keywords
Field
DocType
efficient approach,multiple camera,innovative tennis broadcasts,virtual replays,camera pair,new game statistic,real-time computer vision system,ball tracking,real-time tracking,multiple object,tennis ball,multi-threaded approach,multi threading,computer vision,real time systems,stereo vision,image segmentation,tracking,visualization,statistical analysis,sport,shape,webcasts
Object detection,Broadcasting,Multithreading,Computer vision,Computer graphics (images),Computer science,Thread (computing),Image segmentation,Artificial intelligence,Webcast,Trajectory,Scalability
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1051-4651
36
4.90
References 
Authors
3
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gopal Pingali121721.72
Agata Opalach2848.50
Yves D. Jean3406.67