SoccerNet-Tracking: Multiple Object Tracking Dataset and Benchmark in Soccer Videos

Tracking objects in soccer videos is extremely important to gather both player and team statistics, whether it is to estimate the total distance run, the ball possession or the team formation. Video processing can help automating the extraction of those information, without the need of any invasive sensor, hence applicable to any team on any stadium. Yet, the availability of datasets to train learnable models and benchmarks to evaluate methods on a common testbed is very limited. In this work, we propose a novel dataset for multiple object tracking composed of 200 sequences of 30s each, representative of challenging soccer scenarios, and a complete 45-minutes half-time for long-term tracking. The dataset is fully annotated with bounding boxes and tracklet IDs, enabling the training of MOT baselines in the soccer domain and a full benchmarking of those methods on our segregated challenge sets. Our analysis shows that multiple player, referee and ball tracking in soccer videos is far from being solved, with several improvement required in case of fast motion or in scenarios of severe occlusion.Comment: Paper accepted for the CVsports workshop at CVPR2022. This document contains 8 pages + reference

SoccerNet 2023 Tracking Challenge -- 3rd place MOT4MOT Team Technical Report

The SoccerNet 2023 tracking challenge requires the detection and tracking of soccer players and the ball. In this work, we present our approach to tackle these tasks separately. We employ a state-of-the-art online multi-object tracker and a contemporary object detector for player tracking. To overcome the limitations of our online approach, we incorporate a post-processing stage using interpolation and appearance-free track merging. Additionally, an appearance-based track merging technique is used to handle the termination and creation of tracks far from the image boundaries. Ball tracking is formulated as single object detection, and a fine-tuned YOLOv8l detector with proprietary filtering improves the detection precision. Our method achieves 3rd place on the SoccerNet 2023 tracking challenge with a HOTA score of 66.27.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur

Automatic camera selection for activity monitoring in a multi-camera system for tennis

In professional tennis training matches, the coach needs to be able to view play from the most appropriate angle in order to monitor players' activities. In this paper, we describe and evaluate a system for automatic camera selection from a network of synchronised cameras within a tennis sporting arena. This work combines synchronised video streams from multiple cameras into a single summary video suitable for critical review by both tennis players and coaches. Using an overhead camera view, our system automatically determines the 2D tennis-court calibration resulting in a mapping that relates a player's position in the overhead camera to their position and size in another camera view in the network. This allows the system to determine the appearance of a player in each of the other cameras and thereby choose the best view for each player via a novel technique. The video summaries are evaluated in end-user studies and shown to provide an efficient means of multi-stream visualisation for tennis player activity monitoring