Towards long-term player tracking with graph hierarchies and domain-specific features

In team sports analytics, long-term player tracking remains a challenging task due to player appearance similarity, occlusion, and dynamic motion patterns. Accurately re-identifying players and reconnecting tracklets after extended absences from the field of view or prolonged occlusions is crucial for robust analysis. We introduce SportsSUSHI, a hierarchical graph-based approach that leverages domain-specific features, including jersey numbers, team IDs, and field coordinates, to enhance tracking accuracy. SportsSUSHI achieves high performance on the SoccerNet dataset and a newly proposed hockey tracking dataset. Our hockey dataset, recorded using a stationary camera capturing the entire playing surface, contains long sequences and annotations for team IDs and jersey numbers, making it well-suited for evaluating long-term tracking capabilities. The inclusion of domain-specific features in our approach significantly improves association accuracy, as demonstrated in our experiments. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/mkoshkina/sports-SUSHI.

A General Framework for Jersey Number Recognition in Sports Video

Jersey number recognition is an important task in sports video analysis, partly due to its importance for long-term player tracking. It can be viewed as a variant of scene text recognition. However, there is a lack of published attempts to apply scene text recognition models on jersey number data. Here we introduce a novel public jersey number recognition dataset for hockey and study how scene text recognition methods can be adapted to this problem. We address issues of occlusions and assess the degree to which training on one sport (hockey) can be generalized to another (soccer). For the latter, we also consider how jersey number recognition at the single-image level can be aggregated across frames to yield tracklet-level jersey number labels. We demonstrate high performance on image- and tracklet-level tasks, achieving 91.4% accuracy for hockey images and 87.4% for soccer tracklets. Code, models, and data are available at https://github.com/mkoshkina/jersey-number-pipeline.

Contrastive Learning for Sports Video: Unsupervised Player Classification

We address the problem of unsupervised classification of players in a team sport according to their team affiliation, when jersey colours and design are not known a priori. We adopt a contrastive learning approach in which an embedding network learns to maximize the distance between representations of players on different teams relative to players on the same team, in a purely unsupervised fashion, without any labelled data. We evaluate the approach using a new hockey dataset and find that it outperforms prior unsupervised approaches by a substantial margin, particularly for real-time application when only a small number of frames are available for unsupervised learning before team assignments must be made. Remarkably, we show that our contrastive method achieves 94% accuracy after unsupervised training on only a single frame, with accuracy rising to 97% within 500 frames (17 seconds of game time). We further demonstrate how accurate team classification allows accurate team-conditional heat maps of player positioning to be computed.