Sports Field Registration via Keypoints-aware Label Condition

We propose a novel deep learning framework for sports field registration. The typical algorithmic flow for sports field registration involves extracting field-specific features (e.g., corners, lines, etc.) from field image and estimating the homography matrix between a 2D field template and the field image using the extracted features. Unlike previous methods that strive to extract sparse field features from field images with uniform appearance, we tackle the problem differently. First, we use a grid of uniformly distributed keypoints as our field-specific features to increase the likelihood of having sufficient field features under various camera poses. Then we formulate the keypoints detection problem as an instance segmentation with dynamic filter learning. In our model, the convolution filters are generated dynamically, conditioned on the field image and associated keypoint identity, thus improving the robustness of prediction results. To extensively evaluate our method, we introduce a new soccer dataset, called TS-WorldCup, with detailed field markings on 3812 time-sequence images from 43 videos of Soccer World Cup 2014 and 2018. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-arts on the TS-WorldCup dataset in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Both the code and dataset are available online 1 .