Authors:
            
                    M. Leo
                    
                        
                    
                    ; 
                
                    T. D’Orazio
                    
                        
                    
                    ; 
                
                    N. Mosca
                    
                        
                    
                     and
                
                    A. Distante
                    
                        
                    
                    
                
        
        
            Affiliation:
            
                    
                        
                    
                    Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation, Italy
                
        
        
        
        
        
             Keyword(s):
            Pattern Recognition, Hough Transform, Motion Analysis, Invariant Features.
        
        
            
                Related
                    Ontology
                    Subjects/Areas/Topics:
                
                        Agents
                    ; 
                        Artificial Intelligence
                    ; 
                        Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
                    ; 
                        Enterprise Information Systems
                    ; 
                        Intelligent Agents
                    ; 
                        Internet Technology
                    ; 
                        Strategic Decision Support Systems
                    ; 
                        Web Information Systems and Technologies
                    
            
        
        
            
                Abstract: 
                In this paper a new method for ball recognition in soccer images is proposed. It detects the ball position in each frame but, differently from related previous approaches, it does not require a long and tedious phase to build different positive training sets in order to properly manage the great variance in ball appearance. Moreover it does not need any negative training set, avoiding the difficulties to build it that occur when, as in the soccer context, negative examples abound. A large number of experiments have been carried out on image sequences acquired during real matches of the Italian “Serie A” soccer championship. The reported experiments demonstrate the satisfactory capability of the proposed approach to recognize the ball.