Scene Text Recognition and Tracking to Identify Athletes in Sport Videos

We present an athlete identification module forming part of a system for the personalization of sport video broadcasts. The aim of this module is the localization of athletes in the scene, their identification through the reading of names or numbers printed on their uniforms, and the labelling of frames where athletes are visible. Building upon a previously published algorithm we extract text from individual frames and read these candidates by means of an optical character recognizer (OCR). The OCR-ed text is then compared to a known list of athletes’ names (or numbers), to provide a presence score for each athlete. Text regions are tracked in subsequent frames using a template matching technique. In this way blurred or distorted text, normally unreadable by the OCR, is exploited to provide a denser labelling of the video sequences. Extensive experiments show that themethod proposed is fast, robust and reliable, out-performing results of other systems in the literature.