Exploring Structure for Long-Term Tracking of Multiple Objects in Sports Videos

TL;DR

This paper introduces a structure-based, model-free method for long-term multi-object tracking in sports videos, leveraging an evolving probabilistic graph to handle occlusions and abrupt motions, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

A novel structure-based, model-free approach using an incrementally updated probabilistic graph for robust long-term multi-object tracking in sports videos.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in sports videos

Robustly handles occlusions and abrupt motions

Effective in diverse sports datasets

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for exploiting structural relations to track multiple objects that may undergo long-term occlusion and abrupt motion. We use a model-free approach that relies only on annotations given in the first frame of the video to track all the objects online, i.e. without knowledge from future frames. We initialize a probabilistic Attributed Relational Graph (ARG) from the first frame, which is incrementally updated along the video. Instead of using the structural information only to evaluate the scene, the proposed approach considers it to generate new tracking hypotheses. In this way, our method is capable of generating relevant object candidates that are used to improve or recover the track of lost objects. The proposed method is evaluated on several videos of table tennis, volleyball, and on the ACASVA dataset. The results show that our approach is very robust, flexible and able to outperform other state-of-the-art methods in sports videos that present structural patterns.