The goal of the thesis is to prototype a system for an automatic virtual soccer camera. Given a static wide-angle video of the full pitch, crop out each frame's ‘important region’ (containing the ball and nearby players) to produce a new video that resembles a broadcasted one.

Requirements for the application:

• Input is a video stream (i.e., only the current and the past frames are available for processing).
• Avoid jitter by using smooth pan-tilt-zoom movements.
• The crop-outs should respect the image distortions associated with the pan-tilt-zoom of a real camera on a tripod.
• Include a top-down view of the pitch with marked locations of players and the ball for analysis purposes.

Dataset:

• Research available datasets where the soccer match is recorded as a static, wide-angle frame containing the full pitch.
• Daite can provide a new dataset by recording a match in Slovak First Football League.
• If possible, evaluate the proposed algorithm by comparing it to a broadcasted video of the same match.