Rink-Agnostic Hockey Rink Registration
Jia Cheng Shang Yuhao Chen Mohammad Javad Shafiee David A. Clausi
Hockey rink registration is a useful tool for aiding and automating sports
analysis. When combined with player tracking, it can provide location
information of players on the rink by estimating a homography matrix that can
warp broadcast video frames onto an overhead template of the rink, or vice
versa. However, most existing techniques require accurate ground truth
information, which can take many hours to annotate, and only work on the
trained rink types. In this paper, we propose a generalized rink registration
pipeline that, once trained, can be applied to both seen and unseen rink types
with only an overhead rink template and the video frame as inputs. Our pipeline
uses domain adaptation techniques, semi-supervised learning, and synthetic data
during training to achieve this ability and overcome the lack of non-NHL
training data. The proposed method is evaluated on both NHL (source) and
non-NHL (target) rink data and the results demonstrate that our approach can
generalize to non-NHL rinks, while maintaining competitive performance on NHL
rinks.