A Mixed-Reality System for Broadcasting Sports Video to Mobile Devices

Watching sports, such as tennis and soccer, remains popular for a broad class of consumers. However, audiences might not be able to enjoy their favorite games from a television or PC when they are traveling, so mobile devices are increasingly used for watching sports video. Unfortunately, watching sports on a mobile device is not as simple as watching sports on TV. Bandwidth limitations on wireless networks prevent high bit-rate video transmission. In addition, small displays lose visual details of the sports event. Bandwidth limitations occur primarily when multiple users want to stream video on the same wireless link. These bottlenecks are likely to occur because of the popularity of an event. This article describes a camera modeling based, mixed-reality system concept. The idea is to build a 3D model for sports video, where all parameters of this model can be obtained by analyzing the broadcasting video. Instead of sending original images to the mobile device, the system only sends parameters of the 3D model and the information about players and balls, which can significantly save transmission bandwidth. Additionally, because we have full-quality information about camera modeling and also players and balls, the mobile client is able to recover the important information without loss of the visual details. In addition, we can generate virtual scenes for less important areas, such as the playing field and the commercial billboard, without changing the major story of the sports game.