OpenCV and Blender for use in Broadcast We are a high school broadcasting team looking to up our productions for all of our shows. We are looking to specifically improve our american football productions, as those are some of our big shows. One common element in an American football game is the yellow first down marker. As you can imagine, this is an extremely difficult thing to accomplish for two main reasons:


Keeping the line in the same place as the camera moves is difficult to achieve.
Getting the line to go under the players and not on top of them is difficult.


We have figured out how to place the line under the players using chroma keying on our switcher, so no problem there. There problem is keeping the line in place. We are looking into motion tracking to achieve this, and stumbled upon something called OpenCV. It is essentially an open source video tracking/interpretation software. It has enough power and acceleration to run in real time.

We are looking to do something like this:


Take live video feed from a Decklink card into Blender
Place a 3D model of the football field over it, and use OpenCV to track it to the field.
In the 3D model layer, or with a layer parented to it, have our graphics play.
Send ONLY these graphics back out to our switcher for use in broadcast.


Everything having an SDK (The video card) or being open source (Blender, OpenCV), does this sound like something that could happen? What issues could arise with it?

Thank you
This paper details the solutions and challenges, as well as some technical information to how we completed the project.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1deBHSbWQEG0gIO_ZPd8jKtOnZp0k2a_F