Abstract
Accurate ball tracking in sports is vital for automatic sports analysis yet it is challenging mainly due to the small size and occlusions. This study proposes a novel multi-camera 3D ball tracking (MBT) framework for sports video. The proposed framework consists of four parts: 2D ball detection, 2D ball tracking, 3D position fusion, and 3D ball tracking. In 2D aspect, the multi-scale features are introduced to enhance the 2D ball detection, and the 2D ball tracking is also improved by exploring cross-view information to handle the occlusion and timely updating tracking model with detection results to alleviate the problem of tracking drift. For 3D ball, a novel 3D position fusion method is proposed to optimise the ball position and the 3D ball tracking approach with improved Kalman filter is finally applied to ensure a smooth 3D ball trajectory. Moreover, compared to the existing products in commercial, the proposed framework does not require any special equipment and is thus low cost. Extensive experiments for 2D and 3D ball on a public dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework is robust to ball tracking in sports video, even in the presence of environmental interferences, substantial occlusions, and even calibration errors.
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