An Investigation into the Feasibility of Real-time Soccer Offside Detection from a Multiple Camera System

In this paper, we investigate on the feasibility of multiple camera system for automatic offside detection. We propose six fixed cameras, properly placed on the two sides of the soccer field (three for each side) to reduce perspective and occlusion errors. The images acquired by the synchronized cameras are processed to detect the players' position and the ball position in real-time; a multiple view analysis is carried out to evaluate the offside event, considering the position of all the players in the field, determining the players who passed the ball, and determining if active offside condition occurred. The whole system has been validated using real-time images acquired during official soccer matches, and quantitative results on the system accuracy were obtained comparing the system responses with the ground truth data generated manually on a number of extracted significant sequences.