2D Histogram-based player localization in broadcast volleyball videos

Player location is one of the most informative cues for obtaining tactics arrangement and collecting descriptive game statistics. However, state-of-the-art supervised learning-based methods for player localization require a large amount of labeled training data. Hence, the development of automatic systems for player localization becomes indispensable. Volleyball games reach a huge audience base and contain a variety of tactical strategies, necessitating the implementation of systems for inferring tactics and analyzing formations automatically. Therefore, a novel 2D histogram-based player localization method capable of locating players with occlusions is developed and presented in this paper. The proposed system is able to automatically detect the court lines for camera calibration, extract players by calculating both x and y histograms of extracted player masks, and visualize the team formations on real-world court model. The experiments on broadcast volleyball videos demonstrate efficient and effective results against a traditional object segmentation method (connected component analysis) and a supervised learning approach utilizing histogram of oriented gradient features.