3D ball trajectory reconstruction from single-camera sports video for free viewpoint virtual replay

Free viewpoint video presentation is a new challenge in multimedia analysis. This paper presents an innovative physics-based scheme to reconstruct the 3D ball trajectory from single-camera volleyball video sequences for free viewpoint virtual replay. The problem of 2D-to-3D inference is arduous due to the loss of 3D information in projection to 2D images. The proposed scheme incorporates the domain knowledge of court specification and the physical characteristics of ball motion to accomplish the 2D-to-3D inference. Motion equations with the parameters are set up to define the 3D trajectories based on physical characteristics. Utilizing the geometric transformation of camera calibration, the 2D ball coordinates extracted over frames are used to approximate the parameters of the 3D motion equations, and finally the 3D ball trajectory can be reconstructed from single-camera sequences. The experiments show promising results. The reconstructed 3D trajectory enables the free viewpoint virtual replay and enriched visual presentation, making game watching a whole new experience.