{"ID":2831139,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08467","arxiv_id":"2512.08467","title":"Team-Aware Football Player Tracking with SAM: An Appearance-Based Approach to Occlusion Recovery","abstract":"Football player tracking is challenged by frequent occlusions, similar appearances, and rapid motion in crowded scenes. This paper presents a lightweight SAM-based tracking method combining the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with CSRT trackers and jersey color-based appearance models. We propose a team-aware tracking system that uses SAM for precise initialization and HSV histogram-based re-identification to improve occlusion recovery. Our evaluation measures three dimensions: processing speed (FPS and memory), tracking accuracy (success rate and box stability), and robustness (occlusion recovery and identity consistency). Experiments on football video sequences show that the approach achieves 7.6-7.7 FPS with stable memory usage (~1880 MB), maintaining 100 percent tracking success in light occlusions and 90 percent in crowded penalty-box scenarios with 5 or more players. Appearance-based re-identification recovers 50 percent of heavy occlusions, demonstrating the value of domain-specific cues. Analysis reveals key trade-offs: the SAM + CSRT combination provides consistent performance across crowd densities but struggles with long-term occlusions where players leave the frame, achieving only 8.66 percent re-acquisition success. These results offer practical guidelines for deploying football tracking systems under resource constraints, showing that classical tracker-based methods work well with continuous visibility but require stronger re-identification mechanisms for extended absences.","short_abstract":"Football player tracking is challenged by frequent occlusions, similar appearances, and rapid motion in crowded scenes. This paper presents a lightweight SAM-based tracking method combining the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with CSRT trackers and jersey color-based appearance models. We propose a team-aware tracking sys...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08467","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08467v1","authors":"[\"Chamath Ranasinghe\",\"Uthayasanker Thayasivam\"]","published":"2025-12-09T10:40:17Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}