PassTrack – How it Works

PassTrack relies on Sportvision’s 1st and Ten technologies and is a combination of camera instrumentation and calibration, physics of football and image processing. Precise calibration of camera parameters and a thorough understanding of the physics of the flight of a football are essential to PassTrack. Using these technologies in a system that operates quickly and reliably for on air presentation calls for considerable computer science and video expertise.

The PassTrack system extracts relevant statistics from video and renders graphical elements into SkyCam video on replay. In brief, the video of a pass play is routed into two computers for analysis and an LSM for later replay. When the analysis is completed the LSM plays back the video clip through a third computer which renders graphical elements into the video producing the final enhanced PassTrack video output.

Using the event measurements the PassTrack system can compute a number of descriptive statistics. Example statistics are: the location of the passer, the location of the receiver at the start of a pass, the location of the receiver when a pass is caught, the closing speed of the receiver, the total distance of a pass, the downfield distance of a pass, how fast the football was thrown, and the maximum height the pass achieved.