No Bells Just Whistles: Sports Field Registration by Leveraging Geometric Properties

Marc Gutiérrez-Pérez, Antonio Agudo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 3325-3334

Broadcast sports field registration is traditionally addressed as a homography estimation task mapping the visible image area to a planar field model predominantly focusing on the main camera shot. Addressing the shortcomings of previous approaches we propose a novel calibration pipeline enabling camera calibration using a 3D soccer field model and extending the process to assess the multiple-view nature of broadcast videos. Our approach begins with a keypoint generation pipeline derived from SoccerNet dataset annotations leveraging the geometric properties of the court. Subsequently we execute classical camera calibration through DLT algorithm in a minimalist fashion without further refinement. Through extensive experimentation on real-world soccer broadcast datasets such as SoccerNet-Calibration WorldCup 2014 and TS-WorldCup our method demonstrates superior performance in both multiple- and single-view 3D camera calibration while maintaining competitive results in homography estimation compared to state-of-the-art techniques.