Estimating the Number of Soccer Players using Simulation-based Occlusion Handling

Another article I helped worked on was published a while ago. The article is called “Estimating the Number of Soccer Players using Simulation-based Occlusion Handling”, and can be found at this link.

It details an approach into automatically counting people in a photograph or video frame, with the initial version being used for counting players on a soccer field. This was not a project of mine, but I programmed the simulation used for the results in the article. The simulation is used for gathering training data, and works as show in the following video.

A number of blobs representing players are placed on a virtual soccer field. Then they start moving past each other one step at a time. For every frame, the number of pixels taken up on the screen by 2, 3 and 4 players are counted. This is used to generate a dataset for how many pixels the blobs are expected to take up on the screen at various distances.

The entire simulation is managed by a central manager script, which you can check out here.

The manager script connects to various GameObjects in the Unity project, so if you want to check out the complete project, I have uploaded that as well. Download Link.

2018.