A New Accurate and Fast Homography Computation Algorithm for Sports and Traffic Video Analysis

Abstract

Homography has wide applications in aerial photographic surveys, camera calibration, traffic scene analysis, and sports science, such as player and team performance evaluation. Unlike the mainstream homography that utilizes points as matching features, homography estimation for sports and traffic video can achieve higher accuracy and speed by utilizing straight lines in the scenes, which convey more information than points. Owing to the more stringent requirement of accuracy and computational speed for advanced video analysis, this paper presents a novel homography computational algorithm. Three major novelties are proposed and validated, which are multiple points Hough transform for straight line extraction, correspondence initialization by angle to estimate a set of quasi-optimal solutions, and the feature correspondences optimization to achieve a minimized error using genetic algorithm. With these contributions, the experiments have shown that the proposed algorithm can improve the homography computational accuracy by up to 130% and reduce the processing time by up to 96% over the state-of-the-art algorithms for the same purposes.