Capturing the sporting heroes of our past by extracting 3D movements from legacy video content

Sports are a key part of cultural identity, and it is necessary to preserve them as important intangible Cultural Heritage, especially the human motion techniques specific to individual sports. In this paper we present a method for extracting 3D athlete motion from video broadcast sources, providing an important tool for preserving the heritage represented by these movements. Broadcast videos include camera motion, multiple player interaction, occlusions and noise, presenting significant challenges to solve the reconstruction. The approach requires initial definition of some key-frames and setting of 2D key-points in those frames manually. Thereafter an automatic process estimates the poses and positions of the players in the key-frames, and in the frames between key-frames, taking into account collisions with the environment and human kinematic constraints. Initial results are extremely promising and this data could be used to analyze the sport's evolution over time, or even to generate animations for interactive applications

Recognition and localization of relevant human behavior in videos, SPIE,

ABSTRACT Ground surveillance is normally performed by human assets, since it requires visual intelligence. However, especially for military operations, this can be dangerous and is very resource intensive. Therefore, unmanned autonomous visualintelligence systems are desired. In this paper, we present an improved system that can recognize actions of a human and interactions between multiple humans. Central to the new system is our agent-based architecture. The system is trained on thousands of videos and evaluated on realistic persistent surveillance data in the DARPA Mind's Eye program, with hours of videos of challenging scenes. The results show that our system is able to track the people, detect and localize events, and discriminate between different behaviors, and it performs 3.4 times better than our previous system