Computer Vision Introduction

May 14, 2023

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Welcome to Computer Vision

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You're likely already familar with the concept of computer vision. The idea that we feed the computer some video/images and it can help us determine what is in the frame. This technology powers object identification and tracking throughout a medley of industries, with self-driving cars being a more famous of examples - with second place going to Jian Yang's SeeFood app.

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You've also likely seen companies in other sports, Second Spectrum, Opta, Statsbomb, SportsVU, etc... But this work remains isolated to the NFL, NBA, Soccer, Baseball, and Hockey (read: sports with money). So to bring this technology to volleyball is much harder. The resources to put 18, 4k cameras in every collegiate arena to track players/ball in our sports simply does not exist.

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So we need to solve this problem on the cheap - ideally where anyone with an iPhone and a tripod could get player tracking data + all the benefits that come with it, without spending millions.

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There are a few foundational problems you need to tackle in order to solve computer vision in volleyball:

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Player Tracking

  • Detect players in the frame
  • Follow them around as they move
  • Luckily this is a common problem, so there are many solutions out there
  • Difficulty: pretty easy

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Ball Tracking

  • Detect the volleyball
  • Follow the volleyball
  • Difficulty: easy to medium

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Touch Detection

  • Determine when a touch happens
  • Figure out which player actually touched the ball
  • Difficulty: medium to hard

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Skill Identification

  • Use pose-estimation to teach the network what skills look like
  • Difficulty: medium

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Player Identification

  • Use jersey numbers to ID the players
  • Ugh, this is not easy
  • Difficulty: hard

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Player Re-identification

  • Re-Ugh
  • Difficulty: umm, real real hard
  • Has yet to be solved for single-camera multi-object tracking on this scale?

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Make it Run at Real-Time

  • Should be doable
  • Would enable instant data / analysis
  • In-match data
  • Intriguing data for color commenators
  • In-game sports betting
  • Difficulty: medium to hard, but doable

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Slow and steady over here...