Basic Research on detection of Soccer Player from Field-wide Image by OpenPose

Abstract

In Japan, policies that deal with energetic activity of athletes and improvement in the standards of competitions are implemented towards the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics. From such of circumstances, studies are much conducted on applying ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to sports, in particular, on visualizing players’ positions or tracked movement using measurement instrumentation such as GNSS to analyze their performances. However, there are cases when players cannot wear measurement instrumentation during a game depending on the kind of sports. Therefore, image processing is often used as a main approach to obtaining players’ positions and tracking their movement. In this research, we propose a method for identifying and locating the players by using OpenPose, which can deal with an occlusion with only one camera by performing color interpolation on single-viewpoint image. In the experiment, we evaluate the utility of the method by verifying the identification accuracy for soccer players.