Multiple player tracking in basketball court videos

Abstract

To build a smart basketball court, one basic task is to track players with the aid of the basketball court monitoring. This task can be regarded as a special case of the multiple object tracking (MOT) problem. But different from it, the task puts request to the existing MOT methods with both good accuracy and operational efficiency (toward real time) in the new basketball scenario. To deal with this task, we make the following attempts: (1) Considering the differences between pedestrians and basketball players and the lack of corresponding dataset for basketball players tracking, we construct a new MOT dataset under the basketball court monitoring scene, to better evaluate MOT methods in our task and to help promote future research in the related task, (2) evaluating the performance of the several candidate MOT methods on the new dataset, and (3) proposing the issues to be further addressed in this specific scenario.