5 CONCLUSIONS
In this study, we proposed a basketball player track-
ing method that integrates information from multi-
ple viewpoints appropriately. The method is based
on video captured by hand-held cameras from around
the court and from the spectator seats, and its appli-
cability is very high. We also confirmed that using
OpenPose for player detection is very effective, com-
pared with using the team uniform color alone. Be-
cause team distinction needs to use uniform color, we
plan to extract color information from the OpenPose
detection results.
To confirm the effectiveness of integrating infor-
mation from multiple cameras, we focused on the
implementation of algorithms to integrate trajecto-
ries obtained from each viewpoint on 2-D reference
maps. One of the features of the proposed method
is that player tracking at each viewpoint, called tra-
jectory generation, and integration of these trajecto-
ries, called trajectory generation, are all performed on
the same 2-D reference map using homography. This
makes it possible to evaluate the proximity of the de-
tected player position without depending on the posi-
tion of the player or the camera viewpoint. To oper-
ate this algorithm stably, it is necessary to accurately
detect trajectories from each viewpoint. Currently,
we identify players close to each other in successive
frames as the same player, but in the future we plan
to add statistical improvements, such as introducing
a Kalman Filter (Lu et al., 2013) and Bayesian eval-
uation (Xing et al., 2011). Building a motion model
using the game context (Liu et al., 2013) and mod-
eling the relationship between the ball and the player
(Maksai and X. Wang, 2016) are also important issues
for accurately tracking the player.
Since joint information by the OpenPose can be
used as it is for correspondence from different view-
points, three-dimensional recognition of joint place-
ment is easy to realize. Therefore, in addition to the
closeness of the player position between frames, we
are investigating whether the tracking of the player
can be made more accurate by using the inter-frame
matching of this three-dimensional joint information.
Future issues include three-dimensional recogni-
tion of players, application of this method to team
play and tactical analysis, and ball detection linked to
the recognition of dribbling, passing, and shots. For
this purpose, three-dimensional reconstruction from
joint information detected by the OpenPose is effec-
tive. In recent years, the application of Deep Neural
Network that handles time series to human behavior
recognition has been actively studied. Application to
sports analysis is also underway (Baccouche et al.,
2010), (Tsunoda et al., 2017), (Wang and Zemel,
2016). We plan to develop such a DNN-based method
using joint three-dimensional motion information as
input.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Dr. Shinji Ozawa, Emeritus
professor of Keio University, Japan, for valuable ad-
vice on this research. In addition, we thank Edanz
Group (https://en-author-services.edanzgroup.com/)
for editing a draft of this manuscript. Part of this
work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI, grant num-
ber 19K12046.
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