Recognition and tracking of embedded text in sport videos: a case study

Abstract - We present an athlete recognition module designed for broadcast videos, forming part of a system designed for the personalization of sport video broadcast. The aim of this module is the identification of athletes in the scene through the reading of names or numbers printed on their uniforms and to identify frames where athletes are visible. Using an adaptation of a previously published algorithm we extract text from individual frames and then read these candidates by means of an optical character recognizer (OCR). The OCR-ed text is then compared to an a-priori list of athletes' names (or numbers), to provide a presence score for each athlete. Text regions are subsequently tracked in following frames using a template matching technique. In this way blurred or distorted text, normally unreadable by the OCR, can also be exploited to provide a denser labelling of the video sequences.