Homography Estimation using Deep Learning for Registering All-22 Football Video Frames

Abstract: Homography estimation is a fundamental task in many computer vision applications, but many techniques for estimation rely on complicated feature extraction pipelines. We extend research in direct homography estimation (i.e. without explicit feature extraction) by implementing a convolutional network capable of estimating homographies. Previous work in deep learning based homography estimation calculates homographies between pairs of images, whereas our network takes single image input and registers it to a reference view where no image data is available. The application of the work is registering frames from American football video to a top-down view of the field. Our model manages to register frames in a test set with an average corner error equivalent to less than 2 yards.