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Ice-hockey puck detection and tracking for video highlighting

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Abstract

Detection and tracking of ice-hockey pucks are of interest to sports industry as it allows puck highlighting during broadcast. This paper presents the first attempt at using image processing to detect and track ice-hockey pucks. The technique developed consists of using three pieces of information in ice-hockey video frames. A combination of adaptive gray-level thresholding, adaptive temporal thresholding, and trajectory constraints is used to detect and track pucks. The analysis performed indicates the difficulties of this detection problem when using ice-hockey broadcast video sequences. A comparison of the developed technique is provided with table tennis broadcast video sequences to demonstrate its effectiveness.

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Acknowledgments

This study was jointly sponsored by the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

    Mehmet Yakut & Nasser Kehtarnavaz

  2. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, University of Kocaeli, Kocaeli, Turkey

    Mehmet Yakut

Authors
  1. Mehmet Yakut
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  2. Nasser Kehtarnavaz
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Correspondence to Mehmet Yakut.

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Yakut, M., Kehtarnavaz, N. Ice-hockey puck detection and tracking for video highlighting. SIViP 10, 527–533 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-015-0764-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-015-0764-6

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