People counting and runner identification in athletic races

Abstract

The objective of this project is to create software capable of analyzing a video sequence of running competitions. The analysis consists of detecting the runners, tracking them with the intention of knowing their position when they cross the finish line and counting them. Another functionality of the system will be recognizing the bib numbers, thus making it possible for every runner to get their time. The software was developed studying different techniques of object detection, tracking and character recognition to try to choose the best for this specific application. A set of experiments has been performed to validate the proposed system.