Title: Automated Top View Registration of Broadcast Football Videos,
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel method to register football broadcast video
frames on the static top view model of the playing surface. The proposed method
is fully automatic in contrast to the current state of the art which requires
manual initialization of point correspondences between the image and the static
model. Automatic registration using existing approaches has been difficult due
to the lack of 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 reduce this problem to a minimal per-frame
edge map matching procedure. We show that the per-frame results can be 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 football World Cup 2014.