Precise player segmentation in team sports videos using contrast-aware co-segmentation

Abstract

Player segmentation in team sports videos is challenging but crucial to video semantic understanding, such as player interaction identification and tactic analysis. We leverage the appearance similarity among players of the same team, and cast this task as a co-segmentation problem. In this way, the extra knowledge shared across players significantly reduces unfavorable uncertainty in segmenting individual players. We are also aware that the performance of co-segmentation highly depends on the used features, and further propose a contrast-based approach to estimate the discriminant power of each feature in an unsupervised manner. It turns out that our approach can properly fuse features by assigning higher weights to discriminant ones, and result in remarkable performance gains. The promising results on segmenting basketball players manifest the effectiveness of our approach.