TVCalib: Camera Calibration for Sports Field Registration in Soccer

Jonas Theiner, Ralph Ewerth; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 1166-1175

Abstract


Sports field registration in broadcast videos is typically interpreted as the task of homography estimation, which provides a mapping between a planar field and the corresponding visible area of the image. In contrast to previous approaches, we consider the task as a camera calibration problem. First, we introduce a differentiable objective function that is able to learn the camera pose and focal length from segment correspondences (e.g., lines, point clouds), based on pixel-level annotations for segments of a known calibration object. The calibration module iteratively minimizes the segment reprojection error induced by the estimated camera parameters. Second, we propose a novel approach for 3D sports field registration from broadcast soccer images. Compared to the typical solution, which subsequently refines an initial estimation, our solution does it in one step. The proposed method is evaluated for sports field registration on two datasets and achieves superior results compared to two state-of-the-art approaches.

Related Material


[pdf] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Theiner_2023_WACV, author = {Theiner, Jonas and Ewerth, Ralph}, title = {TVCalib: Camera Calibration for Sports Field Registration in Soccer}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)}, month = {January}, year = {2023}, pages = {1166-1175} }