Motivation
Sports is said to be the social glue of society. It allows people to interact irrespective of their social status, age etc. With the rise of the mass media, a significant quantity of resources has been channeled into sports in order to improve understanding, performance and presentation. For example, areas like performance assessment, which were previously mainly of interest to coaches and sports scientists are now finding applications in broadcast and other media, driven by the increasing use of on-line sports viewing which provides a way of making all sorts of performance statistics available to viewers. Computer vision has recently started to play an important role in sports as seen in for example football where computer vision-based graphics in real-time enhances different aspects of the game.

Computer vision algorithms have a huge potential in many aspects of sports ranging from automatic annotation of broadcast footage, through to better understand of sport injuries, and enhanced viewing. So far the use of computer vision in sports has been scattered between different disciplines.


Program (December 17):

9.00 – 9.10: Welcome
9.10 – 10.00: Invited talk 1: Graham Thomas, BBC
10.00 – 10.30: BREAK
10.45 – 12.00: Oral session 1: Segmentation and Tracking

  • Tennis player segmentation for semantic behavior analysis. Vito Renò, Nicola Mosca, Massimiliano Nitti, Tiziana D’Orazio, Donato Campagnoli, Andrea Prati, Ettore Stella
  • Stroboscopic Image Synthesis of Sports Player from Hand-Held Camera Sequence. Kunihiro Hasegawa, Hideo Saito
  • Soccer Jersey Number Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks. Sebastian Gerke, Karsten Müller, Ralf Schäfer
  • Tracking when the camera looks away. Khurram Soomro, Salman Khokhar, Mubarak Shah
  • Attributed Graphs for Tracking Multiple Objects in Structured Sports Videos. Henrique Morimitsu, Roberto Cesar-Jr., Isabelle Bloch

12.10 – 14.00: LUNCH
14.00 – 15.00: Invited talk 2: Peter Carr, Disney Research
14.10 – 15.25: Oral session 2: Classification and Understanding

  • Understanding Sport Activities from Correspondences of Clustered Trajectories. Francesco Turchini, Lorenzo Seidenari, Alberto Del Bimbo
  • Audio-visual classification of sports types. Rikke Gade, Mohamed Abou-Zleikha, Mads G. Christensen, Thomas B. Moeslund
  • Injury Mechanism Classification in Soccer Videos. O.V. Ramana Murthy, Roland Goecke
  • Predicting Ball Ownership in Basketball from a Monocular View Using Only Player Trajectories. Xinyu Wei, Long Sha, Patrick Lucey, Peter Carr, Sridha Sridharan, Iain Matthews
  • Depth Compensation Model for Gaze Estimation in Sport Analysis. Fabricio Narcizo, Dan Hansen

17.10 – 17.25: Closing remarks

 

Call for papers
The ambition of this workshop is to bring together practitioners and researchers from different disciplines to share ideas and methods on current and future use of computer vision in sports. To this end we welcome computer vision-based research contributions as well as best-practice contributions focusing on the following (and similar) topics:

– estimation of position and motion of cameras and participants in sports
– tracking people and objects in sports
– activity recognition in sports
– event detection in sports
– spectator monitoring
– annotation and indexing in sports
– graphical effects in sports
– analysis of injuries in sports
– performance assessment in sports


Important dates

  • Submission deadline: Extended: September 20 2015
  • Notification of acceptance: October 4 2015
  • Camera ready version: October 14 2015
  • Workshop date: December 17 2015

Special Issue
A special issue based on extended workshop papers alongside submitted papers via an open call, will be published in Computer Vision and Image Understanding with Professor Irfan Essa, Georgia Tech as an additional guest editor.
Link

Keynotes
Graham Thomas, BBC, UK
Peter Carr, Disney Research, USA


Submission instructions
Same as for ICCV: link
Paper submission: link


Program committee:
Chellapa R., Univ. of Maryland, USA
Christmas B., Univ. of Surrey, UK
Cucchiara R., Univ. Modena Reg. Emilia, Italy
Larry Davis, Univ. of Maryland, USA
Dawes R., BBC R&D, UK
Doulamis A.D., Technical University of Crete, Greece
Escalera S., Univ. Of Barcelona, Spain
Ferryman J., Univ. Reading, UK
Gade R., Aalborg University, Denmark
Gall J., Max Planck Inst., Germany
Ghanem B., KAUST, SA
Grau, O, Intel Visual Computing Institute
Gong S., Queen Mary Univ. of London, UK
Gonzalez J., UAB- CVC, Catalonia, Spain
Ikizler-cinbis N., Univ. Boston, USA
Lucey P., Disney Research, Pittsburgh, USA
Perales F., Univ. de les Illes Balears, Spain
Prati A., Univ. Iuav di Venezia, Italy
Setti F., ISTC–CNR (Trento), Italy
Sigal L., Disney Reseach, USA

 

Organizers
Thomas Moeslund, Aalborg University, Denmark
Graham Thomas, BBC, UK
Adrian Hilton, University of Surrey, UK
Peter Carr, Disney Research, Pittsburgh, USA


Previous activities related to computer vision in sports:


Overall Meeting Sponsors