A New Ball Detection Strategy for Enhancing the Performance of Ball Bees Based on Fuzzy Inference Engine

Sports video analysis has received much attention as it is turned to be a hot research area in the field of image processing. This led to opportunities to develop fascinating applications supported by analysis of different sports especially football. Identifying the ball in soccer images is an essential task for not only goal scoring but also players’ evaluation. However, soccer ball detection suffers from several hurdles such as; occlusions, fast moving objects, shadows, poor lighting, color contrast, and other static background objects. Although several ball detection techniques have been introduced such as; Frame Difference, Mixture of Gaussian (MoG), Optical Flow and etc., ball detection in soccer games is still an open research area. In this paper, a new Fuzzy Based Ball Detection (FB 2 D) strategy is proposed for identifying the ball through a set of image sequences extracted form a soccer match video. FB 2 D has the ability to accurately identify the ball even if it is attached to the white lines drawn on the playground or partially occluded behind players. FB 2 D has been compared to recent ball detection techniques. Experimental results have shown that FB 2 D outperforms recent detection techniques as it introduced the maximum accuracy and the accuracy of detection in the testing stage is close to 100%. As well as the minimum error.