Video based soccer ball tracking

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to design a system that is capable of locating and tracking a soccer ball during a normal soccer game. The necessary algorithms for this system accurately distinguish between stationary and moving objects in a stream of video frames and are able to consistently detect which of these moving objects is the soccer ball. The system is aware of the position of the soccer ball at all times. From the coordinates of the ball at a given time, the system is able to estimate where the ball will be located in the next few consecutive frames so as to ease the difficulty of tracking it. The resulting data can then be used to control a camera that will cover the action of the game, or to analyze the game afterwards.