SoccerMan-reconstructing soccer games from video sequences

We present SoccerMan, a soccer game reconstruction system. SoccerMan is capable of generating a description of an animated 3D scene from a video sequence of a soccer game, enabling the user to examine the respective scene from any virtual viewpoint. Starting from a manually marked initial frame, key features (i.e. playground lines) are tracked automatically, using template matching. Camera calibration is done by a specialized linear approximation method, where only a few key features have to be visible in the input frames. Then the playground texture is extracted from the video sequence, and player shapes are detected and tracked automatically over time. Finally, playground texture and textured player shapes are used to model the virtual 3D scene.