Multi Object Tracking (MOT) in ice hockey pursues the combined task of
localizing and associating players across a given sequence to maintain their
identities. Tracking players from monocular broadcast feeds is an important
computer vision problem offering various downstream analytics and enhanced
viewership experience. However, existing trackers encounter significant
difficulties in dealing with occlusions, blurs, and agile player movements
prevalent in telecast feeds. In this work, we propose a novel tracking approach
by formulating MOT as a bipartite graph matching problem infused with
homography. We disentangle the positional representations of occluded and
overlapping players in broadcast view, by mapping their foot keypoints to an
overhead rink template, and encode these projected positions into the graph
network. This ensures reliable spatial context for consistent player tracking
and unfragmented tracklet prediction. Our results show considerable
improvements in both the IDsw and IDF1 metrics on the two available broadcast
ice hockey datasets.

本研究提出了一种将多目标跟踪问题转化为双边图匹配的新方法，通过将球员的足部关节点映射到顶视冰场模板，并将这些投影位置编码到图网络中，实现对遮挡和重叠球员的可靠空间上下文，从而提高了广播冰球数据集中的 IDsw 和 IDF1 指标。