No Bells, Just Whistles: Sports Field Registration by Leveraging
  Geometric Properties
Marc Gutiérrez-Pérez Antonio Agudo
Broadcast sports field registration is traditionally addressed as a
homography estimation task, mapping the visible image area to a planar field
model, predominantly focusing on the main camera shot. Addressing the
shortcomings of previous approaches, we propose a novel calibration pipeline
enabling camera calibration using a 3D soccer field model and extending the
process to assess the multiple-view nature of broadcast videos. Our approach
begins with a keypoint generation pipeline derived from SoccerNet dataset
annotations, leveraging the geometric properties of the court. Subsequently, we
execute classical camera calibration through DLT algorithm in a minimalist
fashion, without further refinement. Through extensive experimentation on
real-world soccer broadcast datasets such as SoccerNet-Calibration, WorldCup
2014 and TS- WorldCup, our method demonstrates superior performance in both
multiple- and single-view 3D camera calibration while maintaining competitive
results in homography estimation compared to state-of-the-art techniques.