Ball appearance improvement in low-resolution soccer videos

Abstract— Multimedia transmissions, especially sports transmissions, are an important share of the services offered by mobile network operators. Due to limited capacity, lossy compression codecs have to be used, inducing a significant quality degradation. The quality impairments can particularly be observed in soccer games, when the ball is blurred or even totally disappears at the low-resolution user terminal. We present a complete system for a suitable preprocessing of the original video by means of ball sharpening or enlarging in the original video sequence to avoid problems caused by resolution down-sampling and compression. The proposed system includes a novel initial ball-recognition algorithm and an improved ball-trajectory tracking. Output videos show a considerable improvement in visual quality. Our proposed algorithm runs robustly and is real-time capable, which allows for preprocessing employment in live broadcasting.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: EI
• Authors: Martin Wrulich, Olivia Nemethova, Luca Superiori, Markus Rupp
• Keywords: EI 2007, Lossy Compression Codecs, Original Video, Significant Quality Degradation