Sport Players Detection and Tracking With a Mixed Network of Planar and Omnidirectional Cameras

A generic approach is presented to detect and track people with a network of fixed and omnidirectional cameras given severely degraded foreground silhouettes. The problem is formulated as a sparsity constrained inverse problem. A dictionary made of atoms representing the presence of a person at a given location is used within the problem formulation. A re- weighted scheme is considered to better approximate the sparsity prior. Although the framework is generic to any scene, the focus of this paper is to evaluate the strength of the proposed approach on a basketball game. The main challenges come from the players' behavior, their similar appearance, and the mutual occlusions present in the views. In addition, the extracted foreground silhouettes are severely degraded due to the polished floor reflecting the players, and the strong shadow present in the scene. We present qualitative and quantitative results with the APIDIS dataset as part of the ICDSC sport challenge

A video-based framework for automatic 3d localization of multiple basketball players : a combinatorial optimization approach

Sports complexity must be investigated at competitions; therefore, non-invasive methods are essential. In this context, computer vision, image processing, and machine learning techniques can be useful in designing a non-invasive system for data acquisition that identifies players’ positions in official basketball matches. Here, we propose and evaluate a novel video-based framework to perform automatic 3D localization of multiple basketball players. The introduced framework comprises two parts. The first stage is player detection, which aims to identify players’ heads at the camera image level. This stage is based on background segmentation and on classification performed by an artificial neural network. The second stage is related to 3D reconstruction of the player positions from the images provided by the different cameras used in the acquisition. This task is tackled by formulating a constrained combinatorial optimization problem that minimizes the re-projection error while maximizing the number of detections in the formulated 3D localization problem8286CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQCOORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DE PESSOAL DE NÍVEL SUPERIOR - CAPESFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPESPNão temNão temNão temWe would like to thank the CAPES, FAEPEX, FAPESP, and CNPq for funding their research. This paper has content from master degree’s dissertation previously published (Monezi, 2016) and available onlin

Sparsity Driven People Localization with a Heterogeneous Network of Cameras

This paper addresses the problem of localizing people in low and high density crowds with a network of heterogeneous cameras. The problem is recast as a linear inverse problem. It relies on deducing the discretized occupancy vector of people on the ground, from the noisy binary silhouettes observed as foreground pixels in each camera. This inverse problem is regularized by imposing a sparse occupancy vector, i.e., made of few non-zero elements, while a particular dictionary of silhouettes linearly maps these non-empty grid locations to the multiple silhouettes viewed by the cameras network. The proposed framework is (i) generic to any scene of people, i.e., people are located in low and high density crowds, (ii) scalable to any number of cameras and already working with a single camera, (iii) unconstrained by the scene surface to be monitored, and (iv) versatile with respect to the camera's geometry, e.g., planar or omnidirectional. Qualitative and quantitative results are presented on the APIDIS and the PETS 2009 Benchmark datasets. The proposed algorithm successfully detects people occluding each other given severely degraded extracted features, while outperforming state-of-the-art people localization technique

Dempster-Shafer based multi-view occupancy maps

Presented is a method for calculating occupancy maps with a set of calibrated and synchronised cameras. In particular, Dempster-Shafer based fusion of the ground occupancies computed from each view is proposed. The method yields very accurate occupancy detection results and in terms of concentration of the occupancy evidence around ground truth person positions it outperforms the state-of-the- art probabilistic occupancy map method and fusion by summing

Sparsity Driven People Localization with a Heterogeneous Network of Cameras

In this paper, we propose to study the problem of localization of a dense set of people with a network of heterogeneous cameras. We propose to recast the problem as a linear inverse problem. The proposed framework is generic to any scene, scalable in the number of cameras and versatile with respect to their geometry, e.g. planar or omnidirectional. It relies on deducing an \emph {occupancy vector}, i.e. the discretized occupancy of people on the ground, from the noisy binary silhouettes observed as foreground pixels in each camera. This inverse problem is regularized by imposing a sparse occupancy vector, i.e. made of few non- zero elements, while a particular dictionary of silhouettes linearly maps these non-empty grid locations to the multiple silhouettes viewed by the cameras network. This constitutes a linearization of the problem, where non- linearities, such as occlusions, are treated as additional noise on the observed silhouettes. Mathematically, we express the final inverse problem either as Basis Pursuit DeNoise or Lasso convex optimization programs. The sparsity measure is reinforced by iteratively re-weighting the $\ell_1$-norm of the occupancy vector for better approximating its $\ell_0$ ``norm'', and a new kind of ``repulsive'' sparsity is used to adapt further the Lasso procedure to the occupancy reconstruction. Practically, an adaptive sampling process is proposed to reduce the computation cost and monitor a large occupancy area. Qualitative and quantitative results are presented on a basketball game. The proposed algorithm successfully detects people occluding each other given severely degraded extracted features, while outperforming state-of-the-art people localization techniques

Streaming and User Behaviour in Omnidirectional Videos

Omnidirectional videos (ODVs) have gone beyond the passive paradigm of traditional video, offering higher degrees of immersion and interaction. The revolutionary novelty of this technology is the possibility for users to interact with the surrounding environment, and to feel a sense of engagement and presence in a virtual space. Users are clearly the main driving force of immersive applications and consequentially the services need to be properly tailored to them. In this context, this chapter highlights the importance of the new role of users in ODV streaming applications, and thus the need for understanding their behaviour while navigating within ODVs. A comprehensive overview of the research efforts aimed at advancing ODV streaming systems is also presented. In particular, the state-of-the-art solutions under examination in this chapter are distinguished in terms of system-centric and user-centric streaming approaches: the former approach comes from a quite straightforward extension of well-established solutions for the 2D video pipeline while the latter one takes the benefit of understanding users’ behaviour and enable more personalised ODV streaming