interesting piece. didnt know anything about it. it has helped the game of football a lot

Wildly technical for me, but interesting nonetheless

I like that because it confirmed my complete guess that I’ve had for years that they did a color replace to get the line to look like it was under the players.

I enjoy being right about things. Maybe that’s why I despise the prediction game so very, very much.

While it didn’t QUITE explain the entire process that is involved* it is an interesting video =).

• It is a process similar to Augmented Reality in which a program is designed to track the 3D manipulation of a known object [in this case the field] and “augment” it with computer generated imagery. The computer is fed or programmed with a basic image (a standard shot of the field) and designed to track view changes of that object through complex algorithms. When they mentioned all the data that is taken from the camera, it was to feed into the algorithms to produce the proper output for use in printing the CGI onscreen. A rudimentary example of this would be a perfect cube. If you were to rotate a camera in a perfect circle around the outside of the cube, there is a relatively simple algorithm (simple in that it only has a few variables) that can be designed to track the precise location of the corner lines on that square at any given point on that rotating circle. Throw in some zoom and tilt, and you’ll need an even more complex algorithm. As a programmer, my hat goes off to the guys (most likely mathematicians) that were able to design these algorithms and advance our technologies to the point of that beautiful yellow line =).

Right up there with the “glow puck.” ;-)