A novel ball tracking method using dynamic kalman filter with two-stage ball search

Tracking the ball in broadcast soccer video is an important yet extremely difficult problem. In this paper, we proposed a novel ball tracking method using dynamic kalman filter with an improved ball search strategy. In order to re-detect the ball when occlusion, a two-stage ball search strategy is used. In this two-stage ball search strategy, the ball is searched around several players. These players are determined by a distance threshold from the one that suspected to occluded the ball. This ball search result is used to update the parameters of dynamic kalman filter. Experimental results have verified the advantage of the proposed method.