From Broadcast to Minimap: Achieving State-of-the-Art SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction

Game State Reconstruction (GSR), a critical task in Sports Video Understanding, involves precise tracking and localization of all individuals on the football field-players, goalkeepers, referees, and others - in real-world coordinates. This capability enables coaches and analysts to derive actionable insights into player movements, team formations, and game dynamics, ultimately optimizing training strategies and enhancing competitive advantage. Achieving accurate GSR using a single-camera setup is highly challenging due to frequent camera movements, occlusions, and dynamic scene content. In this work, we present a robust end-to-end pipeline for tracking players across an entire match using a single-camera setup. Our solution integrates a fine-tuned YOLOv5m for object detection, a SegFormer-based camera parameter estimator, and a DeepSORT-based tracking framework enhanced with re-identification, orientation prediction, and jersey number recognition. By ensuring both spatial accuracy and temporal consistency, our method delivers state-of-the-art game state reconstruction, securing first place in the SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction Challenge 2024 and significantly outperforming competing methods.

RaceLens: A Machine Intelligence-Based Application for Racing Photo Analysis

This paper presents RaceLens, a novel application utilizing advanced deep learning and computer vision models for comprehensive analysis of racing photos. The developed models have demonstrated their efficiency in a wide array of tasks, including detecting racing cars, recognizing car numbers, detecting and quantifying car details, and recognizing car orientations. We discuss the process of collecting a robust dataset necessary for training our models, and describe an approach we have designed to augment and improve this dataset continually. Our method leverages a feedback loop for continuous model improvement, thus enhancing the performance and accuracy of RaceLens over time. A significant part of our study is dedicated to illustrating the practical application of RaceLens, focusing on its successful deployment by NASCAR teams over four seasons. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of our system's performance and its direct impact on the team's strategic decisions and performance metrics. The results underscore the transformative potential of machine intelligence in the competitive and dynamic world of car racing, setting a precedent for future applications.