Skip to main content

A Robust Multi-Athlete Tracking Algorithm by Exploiting Discriminant Features and Long-Term Dependencies

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11295))

Abstract

This paper addresses multiple athletes tracking problem. Athletes tracking is the key to whether sports video analysis can be more effective and practical or not. One great challenge faced by multi-athlete tracking is that athletes, especially the athletes in the same team, share very similar appearance, thus, most existing MOT approaches are hardly applicable in this task. To address this problem, we put forward a novel triple-stream network which could capture long-term dependencies by exploiting pose information to better distinguish different athletes. The method is motivated by the fact that poses of athletes are distinct from each other in a period of time because they play different roles in the team thus could be used as a strong feature to match the correct athletes. We design our Multi-Athlete Tracking (MAT) model on top of the online tracking-by-detection paradigm whereby bounding boxes from the output of a detector are connected across video frames, and improve it from two aspects. Firstly, we propose a Pose-based Triple Stream Networks (PTSN) based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, which are capable of modeling and capturing more subtle differences between athletes. Secondly, based on PTSN, we propose a multi-athlete tracking algorithm that is robust to noisy detection and occlusion. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a collection of volleyball videos by comparing it with recent advanced multi-object trackers.

N. Ran and L. Kong—Authors contributed equally.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Adam, A., Rivlin, E., Shimshoni, I.: Robust fragments-based tracking using the integral histogram. In: CVPR, vol. 1, pp. 798–805. IEEE (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bernardin, K., Stiefelhagen, R.: Evaluating multiple object tracking performance: the CLEAR MOT metrics. J. Image Video Process. 1 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Dicle, C., Camps, O.I., Sznaier, M.: The way they move: tracking multiple targets with similar appearance. In: ICCV, pp. 2304–2311. IEEE (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Fang, H., Xie, S., Tai, Y.W., Lu, C.: RMPE: regional multi-person pose estimation. In: ICCV, vol. 2 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Gomez, G., López, P.H., Link, D., Eskofier, B.: Tracking of ball and players in beach volleyball videos. PLoS ONE 9, e111730 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., Sun, J.: Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: CVPR, pp. 770–778 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Henschel, R., Leal-Taixé, L., Cremers, D., Rosenhahn, B.: Improvements to Frank-Wolfe optimization for multi-detector multi-object tracking. CoRR (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Kim, C., Li, F., Ciptadi, A., Rehg, J.M.: Multiple hypothesis tracking revisited. In: ICCV, pp. 4696–4704. IEEE (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Kuo, C.H., Nevatia, R.: How does person identity recognition help multi-person tracking? In: CVPR, pp. 1217–1224. IEEE (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Leal-Taixe, L., Canton-Ferrer, C., Schindler, K.: Learning by tracking: siamese CNN for robust target association. In: CVPR Workshop. IEEE, June 2016

    Google Scholar 

  11. Leal-Taixé, L., Milan, A., Reid, I., Roth, S., Schindler, K.: Motchallenge 2015: towards a benchmark for multi-target tracking. arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.01942 (2015)

  12. Li, Y., Huang, C., Nevatia, R.: Learning to associate: hybridboosted multi-target tracker for crowded scene. In: CVPR (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Liu, J., Carr, P., Collins, R.T., Liu, Y.: Tracking sports players with context-conditioned motion models. In: CVPR, pp. 1830–1837 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Lu, J., Huang, D., Wang, Y., Kong, L.: Scaling and occlusion robust athlete tracking in sports videos. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 1526–1530. IEEE (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Mauthner, T., Koch, C., Tilp, M., Bischof, H.: Visual tracking of athletes in beach volleyball using a single camera. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Sport 6(2), 21–34 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Milan, A., Leal-Taixé, L., Reid, I., Roth, S., Schindler, K.: MOT16: a benchmark for multi-object tracking. arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.00831 (2016)

  17. Perazzi, F., Pont-Tuset, J., McWilliams, B., Van Gool, L., Gross, M., Sorkine-Hornung, A.: A benchmark dataset and evaluation methodology for video object segmentation. In: CVPR, pp. 724–732 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Ren, S., He, K., Girshick, R., Sun, J.: Faster R-CNN: towards real-time object detection with region proposal networks. In: NIPS, pp. 91–99. MIT Press (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Sadeghian, A., Alahi, A., Savarese, S.: Tracking the untrackable: learning to track multiple cues with long-term dependencies. In: ICCV (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Shu, G., Dehghan, A., Oreifej, O., Hand, E., Shah, M.: Part-based multiple-person tracking with partial occlusion handling. In: CVPR, pp. 1815–1821. IEEE (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Yamaguchi, K., Berg, A.C., Ortiz, L.E., Berg, T.L.: Who are you with and where are you going? In: CVPR, pp. 1345–1352. IEEE (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Yoon, J.H., Yang, M.H., Lim, J., Yoon, K.J.: Bayesian multi-object tracking using motion context from multiple objects. In: 2015 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), pp. 33–40. IEEE (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Yu, F., Li, W., Li, Q., Liu, Y., Shi, X., Yan, J.: POI: multiple object tracking with high performance detection and appearance feature. In: Hua, G., Jégou, H. (eds.) ECCV 2016. LNCS, vol. 9914, pp. 36–42. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48881-3_3

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61573045).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qingjie Liu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Ran, N., Kong, L., Wang, Y., Liu, Q. (2019). A Robust Multi-Athlete Tracking Algorithm by Exploiting Discriminant Features and Long-Term Dependencies. In: Kompatsiaris, I., Huet, B., Mezaris, V., Gurrin, C., Cheng, WH., Vrochidis, S. (eds) MultiMedia Modeling. MMM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11295. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05710-7_34

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05710-7_34

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05709-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05710-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics