On the (soccer) ball

Abstract

The problem of tracking ball in a soccer video is challenging because of sudden change in speed and orientation of the soccer ball. Successful tracking in such a scenario depends on the ability of the algorithm to balance prior constraints continuously against the evidence garnered from the sequences of images. This paper proposes a particle filter based algorithm that tracks the ball when it changes its direction suddenly or takes high speed. Exact, deterministic tracking algorithms based on discretized functional, suffer from severe limitations in the form of prior constraints. Our tracking algorithm has shown excellent result even for partial occlusion which is a major concern in soccer video. We have shown that the proposed tracking algorithm is at least 7.2% better compared to competing approaches for soccer ball tracking.