A Hybrid Approach for Tracking Individual Players in Broadcast Match Videos

Tracking people in a video sequence is a challenging task that has been approached from many perspectives. This task becomes even more complicated when the person to track is a player in a broadcasted sport event, the reasons being the existence of difficulties such as frequent camera movements or switches, total and partial occlusions between players, and blurry frames due to the codification algorithm of the video. This paper introduces a player tracking solution which is both fast and accurate. This allows to track a player precisely in real-time. The approach combines several models that are executed concurrently in a relatively modest hardware, and whose accuracy has been validated against hand-labeled broadcast video sequences. Regarding the accuracy, the tests show that the area under curve (AUC) of our approach is around 0.6, which is similar to generic state of the art solutions. As for performance, our proposal can process high definition videos (1920x1080 px) at 80 fps.