# BroadTrack: Broadcast Camera Tracking for Soccer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01721/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07784/) (2022)
- [SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04527/) (2018)
- [Deep Image Homography Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03798/) (2016)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction: End-to-End Athlete Tracking and Identification on a Minimap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11335/) (2024)
- [SoccerNet 2022 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02365/) (2022)
- [Sports Camera Calibration via Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10658/) (2018)
- [TVCalib: Camera Calibration for Sports Field Registration in Soccer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11709/) (2022)
- [SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06006/) (2023)
- [Optimizing Through Learned Errors for Accurate Sports Field Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08034/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Camera Pose Estimation for Sports Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14109/) (2020)
- [Automated Top View Registration of Broadcast Football Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01437/) (2017)
- [A Universal Protocol to Benchmark Camera Calibration for Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09807/) (2024)
- [PoseNet: A Convolutional Network for Real-Time 6-DOF Camera Relocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07427/) (2015)
- [Video-based Sequential Bayesian Homography Estimation for Soccer Field Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10361/) (2023)
- [A Two-point Method for PTZ Camera Calibration in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09005/) (2018)
- [Automated Camera Calibration via Homography Estimation with GNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02598/) (2023)
- [Localization of Ice-Rink for Broadcast Hockey Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10847/) (2021)
- [Pan-tilt-zoom SLAM for Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08816/) (2019)
- [KaliCalib: A Framework for Basketball Court Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07795/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SoccerMaster: A Vision Foundation Model for Soccer Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11016/) (2025)
- [SoccerNet 2025 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19182/) (2025)
- [Towards Athlete Fatigue Assessment from Association Football Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05636/) (2026)
- [SoccerTrack v2: A Full-Pitch Panoramic Video Dataset for Game State Reconstruction and Ball Action Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01802/) (2025)
- [GTATrack: Winner Solution to SoccerTrack 2025 with Deep-EIoU and Global Tracklet Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00484/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Camera calibration and localization, sometimes simply named camera calibration, enables many applications in the context of soccer broadcasting, for instance regarding the interpretation and analysis of the game, or the insertion of augmented reality graphics for storytelling or refereeing purposes. To contribute to such applications, the research community has typically focused on single-view calibration methods, leveraging the near-omnipresence of soccer field markings in wide-angle broadcast views, but leaving all temporal aspects, if considered at all, to general-purpose tracking or filtering techniques. Only a few contributions have been made to leverage any domain-specific knowledge for this tracking task, and, as a result, there lacks a truly performant and off-the-shelf camera tracking system tailored for soccer broadcasting, specifically for elevated tripod-mounted cameras around the stadium. In this work, we present such a system capable of addressing the task of soccer broadcast camera tracking efficiently, robustly, and accurately, outperforming by far the most precise methods of the state-of-the-art. By combining the available open-source soccer field detectors with carefully designed camera and tripod models, our tracking system, BroadTrack, halves the mean reprojection error rate and gains more than 15% in terms of Jaccard index for camera calibration on the SoccerNet dataset. Furthermore, as the SoccerNet dataset videos are relatively short (30 seconds), we also present qualitative results on a 20-minute broadcast clip to showcase the robustness and the soundness of our system.