Enhancement of speed and accuracy trade-off for sports ball detection in videos—finding fast moving, small objects in real time

Hiemann A, Kautz T, Zottmann T, Hlawitschka M (2021)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2021

Journal

Sensors MDPI

Book Volume: 21

Article Number: 3214

Journal Issue: 9

DOI: 10.3390/s21093214

Abstract

The detection and localization of the ball in sport videos is crucial to better understand events and actions occurring in those sports. Despite recent advances in the field of object detection, the automatic detection of balls remains a challenging task due to the unsteady nature of balls in images. In this paper, we address the detection of small, fast-moving balls in sport video data and introduce a real-time ball detection approach based on the YOLOv3 object detection model. We apply specific adjustments to the network architecture and training process in order to enhance the detection accuracy and speed: We facilitate an efficient integration of motion information, avoiding a complex modification of the network architecture. Furthermore, we present a customized detection approach that is designed to primarily focus on the detection of small objects. We integrate domain-specific knowledge to adapt image pre-processing and a data augmentation strategy that takes advantage of the special features of balls in images in order to improve the generalization ability of the detection network. We demonstrate that the general trade-off between detection speed and accuracy of the YOLOv3 model can be enhanced in consideration of domain-specific prior knowledge.

Authors with CRIS profile

Thomas Kautz Lehrstuhl für Informatik 14 (Bild- und Sprachverarbeitung) (LME)

Involved external institutions

Universität Leipzig DE Germany (DE) Leipzig University of Applied Sciences / Hochschule für Technik, Wirtschaft und Kultur Leipzig (HTWK) DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Hiemann, A., Kautz, T., Zottmann, T., & Hlawitschka, M. (2021). Enhancement of speed and accuracy trade-off for sports ball detection in videos—finding fast moving, small objects in real time. Sensors, 21(9). https://doi.org/10.3390/s21093214

MLA:

Hiemann, Alexander, et al. "Enhancement of speed and accuracy trade-off for sports ball detection in videos—finding fast moving, small objects in real time." Sensors 21.9 (2021).

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