What Players do with the Ball: A Physically Constrained Interaction Modeling
This addresses ball tracking for video-based sports analysis, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods with physical constraints.
The paper tackles the problem of tracking the ball in low-resolution sports videos by proposing a physically constrained interaction model between the ball and players, showing it is more robust and accurate than state-of-the-art methods on volleyball, basketball, and soccer sequences.
Tracking the ball is critical for video-based analysis of team sports. However, it is difficult, especially in low-resolution images, due to the small size of the ball, its speed that creates motion blur, and its often being occluded by players. In this paper, we propose a generic and principled approach to modeling the interaction between the ball and the players while also imposing appropriate physical constraints on the ball's trajectory. We show that our approach, formulated in terms of a Mixed Integer Program, is more robust and more accurate than several state-of-the-art approaches on real-life volleyball, basketball, and soccer sequences.