In this paper we present an investigation into the computer vision problem of tracking humans in digital video. The investigation domain is digital tennis footage and the aim is to track the tennis player and recognise the strokes played. The motivation behind this investigation is to eventually automate the task of digital tennis footage annotation so that metadata, such as the time codes and a description of the strokes played, are automatically appended to the video. This then enables a number of compelling applications, from simple search facilities for the home viewer, to more complex analysis tools suitable for a tennis coach. The system developed solves the problem of tennis player tracking and stroke recognition using relatively simple, and well known, image processing operations constrained by an a priori knowledge of the image capture conditions, the background scene, and the application domain
