This was an experimental project by Savage Internet to see how feasible it would be to track amateur sports players (e.g. for jugger) by means of special optical codes printed on their jerseys. The idea was to fly a drone over the field, capture footage, and use off-the-shelf object tracking together with the optical codes to distinguish players.
This ran into a few snags:
- it's difficult to get footage at high enough resolution of the entire field to actually distinguish optical codes on players' jerseys;
- drones don't really have great battery life, making it difficult to get footage of an entire game.
If we were to resurrect this project, we'd probably try just the object tracking part, and use a stationary boom to elevate a fixed camera above the field. We might also consider multiple cameras at different locations.
Anyways, this was a fun project!