Multi-camera analysis of soccer sequences

The automatic detection of meaningful phases in a soccer game depends on the accurate localization of players and the ball at each moment. However, the automatic analysis of soccer sequences is a challenging task due to the presence of fast moving multiple objects. For this purpose, we present a multi-camera analysis system that yields the position of the ball and players on a common ground plane. The detection in each camera is based on a code-book algorithm and different features are used to classify the detected blobs. The detection results of each camera are transformed using homography to a virtual top-view of the playing field. Within this virtual top-view we merge trajectory information of the different cameras allowing to refine the found positions. In this paper, we evaluate the system on a public SOCCER dataset and end with a discussion of possible improvements of the dataset

Data Hiding in Digital Video

With the rapid development of digital multimedia technologies, an old method which is called steganography has been sought to be a solution for data hiding applications such as digital watermarking and covert communication. Steganography is the art of secret communication using a cover signal, e.g., video, audio, image etc., whereas the counter-technique, detecting the existence of such as a channel through a statistically trained classifier, is called steganalysis. The state-of-the art data hiding algorithms utilize features; such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients, pixel values, motion vectors etc., of the cover signal to convey the message to the receiver side. The goal of embedding algorithm is to maximize the number of bits sent to the decoder side (embedding capacity) with maximum robustness against attacks while keeping the perceptual and statistical distortions (security) low. Data Hiding schemes are characterized by these three conflicting requirements: security against steganalysis, robustness against channel associated and/or intentional distortions, and the capacity in terms of the embedded payload. Depending upon the application it is the designer\u27s task to find an optimum solution amongst them. The goal of this thesis is to develop a novel data hiding scheme to establish a covert channel satisfying statistical and perceptual invisibility with moderate rate capacity and robustness to combat steganalysis based detection. The idea behind the proposed method is the alteration of Video Object (VO) trajectory coordinates to convey the message to the receiver side by perturbing the centroid coordinates of the VO. Firstly, the VO is selected by the user and tracked through the frames by using a simple region based search strategy and morphological operations. After the trajectory coordinates are obtained, the perturbation of the coordinates implemented through the usage of a non-linear embedding function, such as a polar quantizer where both the magnitude and phase of the motion is used. However, the perturbations made to the motion magnitude and phase were kept small to preserve the semantic meaning of the object motion trajectory. The proposed method is well suited to the video sequences in which VOs have smooth motion trajectories. Examples of these types could be found in sports videos in which the ball is the focus of attention and exhibits various motion types, e.g., rolling on the ground, flying in the air, being possessed by a player, etc. Different sports video sequences have been tested by using the proposed method. Through the experimental results, it is shown that the proposed method achieved the goal of both statistical and perceptual invisibility with moderate rate embedding capacity under AWGN channel with varying noise variances. This achievement is important as the first step for both active and passive steganalysis is the detection of the existence of covert channel. This work has multiple contributions in the field of data hiding. Firstly, it is the first example of a data hiding method in which the trajectory of a VO is used. Secondly, this work has contributed towards improving steganographic security by providing new features: the coordinate location and semantic meaning of the object

An effective trajectory-based algorithm for ball detection and tracking with application to the analysis of broadcast sports video

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A technology platform for automatic high-level tennis game analysis

Sports video research is a popular topic that has been applied to many prominent sports for a large spectrum of applications. In this paper we introduce a technology platform which has been developed for the tennis context, able to extract action sequences and provide support to coaches for players performance analysis during training and official matches. The system consists of an hardware architecture, devised to acquire data in the tennis context and for the specific domain requirements, and a number of processing modules which are able to track both the ball and the players, to extract semantic information from their interactions and automatically annotate video sequences. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the proposed combination of hardware and software modules is able to extract 3D ball trajectories robust enough to evaluate ball changes of direction recognizing serves, strokes and bounces. Starting from these information, a finite state machine based decision process can be employed to evaluate the score of each action of the game. The entire platform has been tested in real experiments during both training sessions and matches, and results show that automatic annotation of key events along with 3D positions and scores can be used to support coaches in the extraction of valuable information about players intentions and behaviours

Video semantic content analysis based on ontology

The rapid increase in the available amount of video data is creating a growing demand for efficient methods for understanding and managing it at the semantic level. New multimedia standards, such as MPEG-4 and MPEG-7, provide the basic functionalities in order to manipulate and transmit objects and metadata. But importantly, most of the content of video data at a semantic level is out of the scope of the standards. In this paper, a video semantic content analysis framework based on ontology is presented. Domain ontology is used to define high level semantic concepts and their relations in the context of the examined domain. And low-level features (e.g. visual and aural) and video content analysis algorithms are integrated into the ontology to enrich video semantic analysis. OWL is used for the ontology description. Rules in Description Logic are defined to describe how features and algorithms for video analysis should be applied according to different perception content and low-level features. Temporal Description Logic is used to describe the semantic events, and a reasoning algorithm is proposed for events detection. The proposed framework is demonstrated in a soccer video domain and shows promising results

Video semantic content analysis framework based on ontology combined MPEG-7

The rapid increase in the available amount of video data is creating a growing demand for efficient methods for understanding and managing it at the semantic level. New multimedia standard, MPEG-7, provides the rich functionalities to enable the generation of audiovisual descriptions and is expressed solely in XML Schema which provides little support for expressing semantic knowledge. In this paper, a video semantic content analysis framework based on ontology combined MPEG-7 is presented. Domain ontology is used to define high level semantic concepts and their relations in the context of the examined domain. MPEG-7 metadata terms of audiovisual descriptions and video content analysis algorithms are expressed in this ontology to enrich video semantic analysis. OWL is used for the ontology description. Rules in Description Logic are defined to describe how low-level features and algorithms for video analysis should be applied according to different perception content. Temporal Description Logic is used to describe the semantic events, and a reasoning algorithm is proposed for events detection. The proposed framework is demonstrated in sports video domain and shows promising results