BroadTrack: Broadcast Camera Tracking for Soccer

Floriane Magera, Thomas Hoyoux, Olivier Barnich, Marc Van Droogenbroeck; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 6177-6187

Camera calibration and localization sometimes simply named camera calibration enables many applications in the context of soccer broadcasting for instance regarding the interpretation and analysis of the game or the insertion of augmented reality graphics for storytelling or refereeing purposes. To contribute to such applications the research community has typically focused on single-view calibration methods leveraging the near-omnipresence of soccer field markings in wide-angle broadcast views but leaving all temporal aspects if considered at all to general-purpose tracking or filtering techniques. Only a few contributions have been made to leverage any domain-specific knowledge for this tracking task and as a result there lacks a truly performant and off-the-shelf camera tracking system tailored for soccer broadcasting specifically for elevated tripod-mounted cameras around the stadium. In this work we present such a system capable of addressing the task of soccer broadcast camera tracking efficiently robustly and accurately outperforming by far the most precise methods of the state-of-the-art. By combining the available open-source soccer field detectors with carefully designed camera and tripod models our tracking system BroadTrack halves the mean reprojection error rate and gains more than 15% in terms of Jaccard index for camera calibration on the SoccerNet dataset. Furthermore as the SoccerNet dataset videos are relatively short (30 seconds) we also present qualitative results on a 20-minute broadcast clip to showcase the robustness and the soundness of our system.