DeepPlayer-Track: Player and Referee Tracking With Jersey Color Recognition in Soccer

Abstract

In real-world sports video analysis, identity switching caused by inter-object interactions is still a major difficulty for multi-player tracking. Due to similar appearances of players on the same squad, existing methodologies make it difficult to correlate detections and retain identities. In this paper, a novel approach (DeepPlayer-Track) is proposed to track the players and referees, by representing the deep features to retain the tracking identity. To provide identity-coherent trajectories, a sophisticated multi-player tracker is being developed further, encompassing deep features of player and referee identification. The proposed methodology consists of two parts: (i) the You Only Look Once (YOLOv4) can detect and classify players, soccer balls, referees, and background; (ii) Applying a modified deep feature association with a simple online real-time (SORT) tracking model which connects nodes from frame to frame using cosine distance and deep appearance descriptor to correlate the coefficient of the player identity (ID) which improved tracking performance by distinct identities. The proposed model achieved a tracking accuracy of 96% and 60% on MOTA and GMOTA metrics respectively with a detection speed of 23 frames per second (FPS).