Setting a Baseline for long-shot real-time Player and Ball detection in Soccer Videos

Players and ball detection are among the first required steps on a football analytics platform. Until recently, the existing open datasets on which the evaluations of most models were based, were not sufficient. In this work, we point out their weaknesses, and with the advent of the SoccerNet v3, we propose and deliver to the community an edited part of its dataset, in YOLO normalized annotation format for training and evaluation. The code of the methods and metrics are provided so that they can be used as a benchmark in future comparisons. The recent YOLO8n model proves better than FootAndBall in long-shot real-time detection of the ball and players on football fields.

$H$-RANSAC, an algorithmic variant for Homography image transform from featureless point sets: application to video-based football analytics

Estimating homography matrix between two images has various applications like image stitching or image mosaicing and spatial information retrieval from multiple camera views, but has been proved to be a complicated problem, especially in cases of radically different camera poses and zoom factors. Many relevant approaches have been proposed, utilizing direct feature based, or deep learning methodologies. In this paper, we propose a generalized RANSAC algorithm, H-RANSAC, to retrieve homography image transformations from sets of points without descriptive local feature vectors and point pairing. We allow the points to be optionally labelled in two classes. We propose a robust criterion that rejects implausible point selection before each iteration of RANSAC, based on the type of the quadrilaterals formed by random point pair selection (convex or concave and (non)-self-intersecting). A similar post-hoc criterion rejects implausible homography transformations is included at the end of each iteration. The expected maximum iterations of $H$-RANSAC are derived for different probabilities of success, according to the number of points per image and per class, and the percentage of outliers. The proposed methodology is tested on a large dataset of images acquired by 12 cameras during real football matches, where radically different views at each timestamp are to be matched. Comparisons with state-of-the-art implementations of RANSAC combined with classic and deep learning image salient point detection indicates the superiority of the proposed $H$-RANSAC, in terms of average reprojection error and number of successfully processed pairs of frames, rendering it the method of choice in cases of image homography alignment with few tens of points, while local features are not available, or not descriptive enough. The implementation of $H$-RANSAC is available in https://github.com/gnousias/H-RANSAC