Leader and Breakaway Detection in Racing Sports Videos

This paper addresses the important problem of leader detection in racing sports videos (e.g., cycling, boating and car racing events), as his/her proper framing is a pivotal issue in racing sports cinematography, where the events have a linear spatial deployment. Over the last few years, as autonomous drone vision and cinematography emerged, new challenges appeared in drone vision. While, until recently, most computer vision methods typically addressed still camera AV footage, drone sports cinematography typically employs moving cameras. In this paper, we solve the problem of leader detection in a group of similarly moving targets in sports videos, e.g. the leader of a sports cyclist group and his/her breakaway during a cycling event. This is very useful in drone sports cinematography, as it is important that the drone camera automatically centers on such a leader. We demonstrate that the novel method described in this paper can effectively solve the problem of leader detection in sports videos.