Real-Time Camera Operator Segmentation with YOLOv8 in Football Video Broadcasts

Using instance segmentation and video inpainting provides a significant leap in real-time football video broadcast enhancements by removing potential visual distractions, such as an occasional person or another object accidentally occupying the frame. Despite its relevance and importance in the media industry, this area remains challenging and relatively understudied, thus offering potential for research. Specifically, the segmentation and inpainting of camera operator instances from video remains an underexplored research area. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a framework designed to accurately detect and remove camera operators while seamlessly hallucinating the background in real-time football broadcasts. The approach aims to enhance the quality of the broadcast by maintaining its consistency and level of engagement to retain and attract users during the game. To implement the inpainting task, firstly, the camera operators instance segmentation method should be developed. We used a YOLOv8 model for accurate real-time operator instance segmentation. The resulting model produces masked frames, which are used for further camera operator inpainting. Moreover, this paper presents an extensive "Cameramen Instances" dataset with more than 7500 samples, which serves as a solid foundation for future investigations in this area. The experimental results show that the YOLOv8 model performs better than other baseline algorithms in different scenarios. The precision of 95.5%, recall of 92.7%, mAP50-95 of 79.6, and a high FPS rate of 87 in low-volume environment prove the solution efficacy for real-time applications.