Camera calibration in sport event scenarios

• We design a novel and robust methodology for calibrating cameras in sport scenarios.
• Calibration is performed with the information provided by only a single image.
• Recognition of the sport court location in the scene by estimating the homography.
• Dealing with problems like a few visible primitives, shaded areas and lens distortion.

The main goal of this paper is the design of a novel and robust methodology for calibrating cameras from a single image in sport scenarios, such as a soccer field, or a basketball or tennis court. In these sport scenarios, the only references we use to calibrate the camera are the lines and circles delimiting the different regions. The first problem we address is the extraction of image primitives, including the challenging problems of shaded regions and lens distortion. From these primitives, we automatically recognise the location of the sport court in the scene by estimating the homography which matches the actual court with its projection onto the image. This is achieved even when only a few primitives are available. Finally, from this homography, we recover the camera calibration parameters. In particular, we estimate the focal length as well as the position and orientation in the 3D space. We present some experiments on models and real courts which illustrate the accuracy of the proposed methodology.