Estimation of Ball Route under Overlapping with Players and Lines in Soccer Video Image Sequence

This paper deals with the analysis of broadcast soccer video. To recognize interesting events such as a goal, estimation of ball movements is necessary. It is, however, sometimes difficult to detect a ball by a simple color and shape-based method when it overlaps with players and lines. We therefore develop a method of estimating a ball route during such overlaps by considering spatio-temporal relationships between players, lines, and the ball. The method can deal with difficult cases such as the one where a ball disappears at a player and re-appears from another player. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the method