SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction: End-to-End Athlete Tracking and Identification on a Minimap

Tracking and identifying athletes on the pitch holds a central role in collecting essential insights from the game, such as estimating the total distance covered by players or understanding team tactics. This tracking and identification process is crucial for reconstructing the game state, defined by the athletes' positions and identities on a 2D top-view of the pitch, (i.e. a minimap). However, reconstructing the game state from videos captured by a single camera is challenging. It requires understanding the position of the athletes and the viewpoint of the camera to localize and identify players within the field. In this work, we formalize the task of Game State Reconstruction and introduce SoccerNet-GSR, a novel Game State Reconstruction dataset focusing on football videos. SoccerNet-GSR is composed of 200 video sequences of 30 seconds, annotated with 9.37 million line points for pitch localization and camera calibration, as well as over 2.36 million athlete positions on the pitch with their respective role, team, and jersey number. Furthermore, we introduce GS-HOTA, a novel metric to evaluate game state reconstruction methods. Finally, we propose and release an end-to-end baseline for game state reconstruction, bootstrapping the research on this task. Our experiments show that GSR is a challenging novel task, which opens the field for future research. Our dataset and codebase are publicly available at https://github.com/SoccerNet/sn-gamestate.

How semantic and geometric information mutually reinforce each other in ToF object localization

We propose a novel approach to localize a 3D object from the intensity and depth information images provided by a Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensor. Our method uses two CNNs. The first one uses raw depth and intensity images as input, to segment the floor pixels, from which the extrinsic parameters of the camera are estimated. The second CNN is in charge of segmenting the object-of-interest. As a main innovation, it exploits the calibration estimated from the prediction of the first CNN to represent the geometric depth information in a coordinate system that is attached to the ground, and is thus independent of the camera elevation. In practice, both the height of pixels with respect to the ground, and the orientation of normals to the point cloud are provided as input to the second CNN. Given the segmentation predicted by the second CNN, the object is localized based on point cloud alignment with a reference model. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed two-step approach improves segmentation and localization accuracy by a significant margin compared to a conventional CNN architecture, ignoring calibration and height maps, but also compared to PointNet++.