Sports Video Athlete Detection Based on Associative Memory Neural Network

Abstract

Aiming at the detection of athletes in sports videos, an automatic detection method based on AMNN is proposed. The background image from the image sequence is obtained, the moving area is extracted, and the color information of pixels to extract the green stadium from the background image is used. In order to improve the accuracy of athletes’ detection, the texture similarity measurement method is used to eliminate the shadow in the movement area, the morphological method is used to eliminate the cracks in the area, and the noise outside the stadium is removed according to the stadium information. Combined with the images of nonathletes, a training set is constructed to train the NN classifier. For the input image frames, image pyramids of different scales are constructed by subsampling and the positions of several candidate athletes are detected by NN. The center of gravity of candidate athletes is calculated, a representative candidate athlete is obtained, and then, the final athlete position through a local search process is determined. Experiments show that the system can accurately detect the motion shape of moving targets, can process images in real time, and has good real-time performance.