Automated Top View Registration of Broadcast Football Videos

In this paper, we propose a fully automatic method to register football broadcast video frames on the static top view model of the playing surface. Automatic registration has been difficult due to the difficulty of finding sufficient point correspondences. We investigate an alternate approach exploiting the edge information from the line markings on the field. We formulate the registration problem as a nearest neighbour search over a synthetically generated dictionary of edge map and homography pairs. The synthetic dictionary generation allows us to exhaustively cover a wide variety of camera angles and positions and reduces this problem to a minimal per-frame edge map matching problem. We show that the per-frame results can be further improved in videos using an optimization framework for temporal camera stabilization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by presenting extensive results on a dataset collected from matches of the football World Cup 2014 and show significant improvement over the current state of the art.