BMVC 2004, Kingston, 7th-9th Sept, 2004
Shadow Classification and Evaluation for Soccer Player Detection
J. Renno, J. Orwell, D. Thirde and G.A. Jones (Kingston University)
In a football stadium environment with multiple overhead floodlights, many
protruding shadows can be observed originating from each of the targets. To
successfully track individual targets, it is essential to achieve an accurate representation
of the foreground. Unfortunately,many of the existing techniques
are sensitive to shadows, falsely classifying them as foreground. In this work
an unsupervised learning procedure that determines the RGB colour distributions
of the foreground and shadow classes of feature data is proposed. A
novel skelatonisation and spatial filtering process is developed for identifying
components in the foreground segmentation that are most-likely to belong to
each class of feature. A pixel classification mechanism is obtained at by approximating
both classes of feature data by N Gaussian parametric models.
To assess our technique's performance and reliability, a comparison is made
with other published works.
(pdf article)