"Three cameras on each side of the court..."
This reminds me of a talk I heard a long time ago from Takeo Kanade at CMU, who was working on reconstructing 3D scenes from multiple cameras shooting different angles of the same action. One example was basketball, and he had a demo showing a play reconstructed as if the camera was on the ball. Pretty cool stuff. It needed lots of cameras, though, and I remember asking him if they had explored how well you could do with a minimum # of cameras. I remember his reply being essentially that they were less interested in bad results with few cameras :)
Here's a link to some surprisingly old press about his work being used for Super Bowl 35 in 2001: http://www.ri.cmu.edu/events/sb35/tksuperbowl.html They used 30 cameras.
if you only have to idenitify 24 people, you could probably do that on height plus some other physical dimension
found this:
Our natural gait, it turns out, defines us as humans. Not speaking broadly — that we’re only truly bipedal mammal on the earth, blah blah blah — but as individuals. Researchers are increasingly convinced that how we walk can identify us as unique individuals, much like a fingerprint or retina scan.
This sort of research has been underway since the late 1990s, picking up more urgency after the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and the London train attack in 2005. DARPA and Homeland Security, among others, are keenly interested in video analysis programs that can separate out and analyze an individual gait, then use this like fingerprints. DARPA has been sponsoring “human identification at a distance” studies since 2000, which often combines gait analysis with facial and gesture analysis. It’s a hot field right now, and has been heralded as a less invasive approach than retina scans or blood tests or fingerprinting. One study I read on the algorithms of walking put the appeal simply: “Advantages include the fact that it does not require subject cooperation or body contact, and the sensor may be located remotely.”