Multi-view Player Action Recognition in Soccer Games

Human action recognition is an important research area in the field of computer vision having a great number of real-world applications. This paper presents a multi-view action recognition framework able to extract human silhouette clues from different synchronized static cameras and then to validate them by analyzing scene dynamics. Two different algorithmic procedures were introduced: the first one performs, in each acquired image, the neural recognition of the human body configuration by using a novel mathematical tool called Contourlet transform. The second procedure performs, instead, 3D ball and player motion analysis. The outcomes of both procedures are then merged to accomplish the final player action recognition task. Experiments were carried out on several image sequences acquired during some matches of the Italian "Serie A" soccer championship.