Saturday, June 14, 2008

Big brother is watching you ... run ... run ..

Computer vision is an interesting field, well, first of all the name is interesting... it says computer "VISION".. like vision is something which is very basic for computers and has had a long history :).. the field is very young though and still a lot of areas which needs to be covered or uncovered in fact.

A recent application of computer vision recently has been in the Euro 2008 games. I was shocked a bit the first time I saw a player was being substituted and they showed the amount of kilometers this guy had ran. The first guess I had was that they use one of those little gadgets that you can attach to your waist and run with.. but a bit of investigation revealed that the technology uses several cameras to cover the field and stream the video into a few computers that basically analyze the scene, find out the needed information and do the necessary calculations. Quite cool and interesting.

6 comments:

MNO said...

Wow that's great...unfortunately we cannot watch the games here since the television don't show them, moreover now it is the examination period, and we don't have time to do so :).

By the way I was wondering how they distinguish the players? how do they track every single of them? it could not be the color their shirts. probably their names or numbers on the shirts! do you have any idea?

Set aside the tracking issue how do they calculate the distance traveled? because the players move on different directions on the plane, and I guess there should be some geometry involved for doing a reasonable calculation. they could also measure the speed of the player by finding the distance he has moved in pixels in two consecutive frames and they also have the time period, so they can calculate the distance.

After all you can find a lot of vision related lectures here and here by Ramani Duraiswami

They are very nice resources, and Ali Zandifar has been the Ramani's PhD student.

Amir H. Fassihi said...

Yes indeed the way they can track one single player is amazing... the algorithm should somehow be able to distinguish the player from frame to frame and its interesting that it doesn't mix up players when they get close to one another... or does it !?
;)

Unknown said...

Hey bro...still I am working in the same field........recently...I joined impressive startup and working with talented people....

Now the are is interactive video using computer vision technology.....let me know if you like to know more about it.....

Amir H. Fassihi said...

I'd be glad to know more...

Unknown said...

I will be in IRAN from Jan 1 to Jan 19.........

Amir H. Fassihi said...

You are my man Zandifar I assume ;)...