Robust player detection and tracking in broadcast soccer video based on enhanced particle filter

It is significant to detect and track soccer players in broadcast sports video, which is helpful to analysis player activity and team tactics. However, it is challenging to efficiently detect and track soccer players with shots switched and noise caused by auditorium and billboards. And for multi-player tracking how to treat the increase or decrease of player are also difficult. In this paper, a robust player detection algorithm based on salient region detection and tracking based on enhanced particle filtering are proposed. Salient region detection is used to segment sports fields, and then soccer players are detected by edge detection combined with Otsu algorithm. For soccer players tracking, we use an enhanced particle filter which we improve the algorithm in sample and the likelihood function combing the color feature and edge feature. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm can quickly and accurately detect and track soccer players in broadcast video.