No Bells, Just Whistles: Sports Field Registration by Leveraging Geometric Properties

Abstract

Broadcast sports field registration is traditionally addressed as a homography estimation task, mapping the visible image area to a planar field model, predominantly focusing on the main camera shot. Addressing the shortcomings of previous approaches, we propose a novel calibration pipeline enabling camera calibration using a 3D soccer field model and extending the process to assess the multiple-view nature of broadcast videos. Our approach begins with a keypoint generation pipeline derived from SoccerNet dataset annotations, leveraging the geometric properties of the court. Subsequently, we execute classical camera calibration through DLT algorithm in a minimalist fashion, without further refinement. Through extensive experimentation on real-world soccer broadcast datasets such as SoccerNet-Calibration, WorldCup 2014 and TS-WorldCup, our method demonstrates superior performance in both multiple- and single-view 3D camera calibration while maintaining competitive results in homography estimation compared to state-of-the-art techniques. 1