Occlusion-Aware Advertisement Placement in Soccer Penalty Area

Abstract

Advert placement in sports broadcasts is a growing strategy to boost sponsor visibility without disrupting live gameplay. Achieving realism, however, requires careful handling of scene geometry and dynamic occlusions from players and the sports ball. In this work, we propose an occlusion-aware and perspective-consistent framework specifically for virtual advert placement in the soccer penalty area. We introduce an automatic procedure to select a geometrically consistent quadrilateral region inside the penalty area from predicted field coordinates, which is then used for homography-based warping. We integrate instance-level occlusion masks with Laplacian Alpha Blending for dynamic occlusion-aware blending so that the virtual advert is correctly placed behind players and the ball. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our occlusion-aware advert placement method preserves high visual fidelity with an average SSIM of 0.97 and PSNR of 31.6 dB, while maintaining temporal consistency with flicker index increase of <7%. Furthermore, we analyze occlusion preservation by comparing advert insertion with and without occlusion handling. A decrease in this metric indicates that objects overlapping the advert region become incorrectly hidden after advert insertion. The results highlight the importance of occlusion-aware blending for maintaining scene integrity and visual realism. By effectively managing occlusions, the proposed framework reduces visual artifacts and improves perceptual quality, producing augmented sports footage that is realistic and visually coherent.