Ozone Cues Mitigate Reflected Downwelling Radiance in LWIR Absorption-Based Ranging

Passive long-wave infrared (LWIR) absorption-based ranging relies on atmospheric absorption to estimate distances to objects from their emitted thermal radiation. First demonstrated decades ago for objects much hotter than the air and recently extended to scenes with low temperature variations, this ranging has depended on reflected radiance being negligible. Downwelling radiance is especially problematic, sometimes causing large inaccuracies. In two new ranging methods, we use characteristic features from ozone absorption to estimate the contribution of reflected downwelling radiance. The quadspectral method gives a simple closed-form range estimate from four narrowband measurements, two at a water vapor absorption line and two at an ozone absorption line. The hyperspectral method uses a broader spectral range to improve accuracy while also providing estimates of temperature, emissivity profiles, and contributions of downwelling from a collection of zenith angles. Experimental results demonstrate improved ranging accuracy, in one case reducing error from over 100 m when reflected light is not modeled to 6.8 m with the quadspectral method and 1.2 m with the hyperspectral method.

SoccerNet 2025 Challenges Results

The SoccerNet 2025 Challenges mark the fifth annual edition of the SoccerNet open benchmarking effort, dedicated to advancing computer vision research in football video understanding. This year's challenges span four vision-based tasks: (1) Team Ball Action Spotting, focused on detecting ball-related actions in football broadcasts and assigning actions to teams; (2) Monocular Depth Estimation, targeting the recovery of scene geometry from single-camera broadcast clips through relative depth estimation for each pixel; (3) Multi-View Foul Recognition, requiring the analysis of multiple synchronized camera views to classify fouls and their severity; and (4) Game State Reconstruction, aimed at localizing and identifying all players from a broadcast video to reconstruct the game state on a 2D top-view of the field. Across all tasks, participants were provided with large-scale annotated datasets, unified evaluation protocols, and strong baselines as starting points. This report presents the results of each challenge, highlights the top-performing solutions, and provides insights into the progress made by the community. The SoccerNet Challenges continue to serve as a driving force for reproducible, open research at the intersection of computer vision, artificial intelligence, and sports. Detailed information about the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards can be found at https://www.soccer-net.org, with baselines and development kits available at https://github.com/SoccerNet.