Search

The SoccerNet 2022 challenges were the second annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. In 2022, the challenges were composed of 6 vision-based tasks: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving action timestamps in long untrimmed videos, (2) replay grounding, focusing on retrieving the live moment of an action shown in a replay, (3) pitch localization, focusing on detecting line and goal part elements, (4) camera calibration, dedicated to retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters, (5) player re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, and (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams. Compared to last year's challenges, tasks (1-2) had their evaluation metrics redefined to consider tighter temporal accuracies, and tasks (3-6) were novel, including their underlying data and annotations. More information on the tasks, challenges and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits are available on https://github.com/SoccerNet., Comment: Accepted at ACM MMSports 2022

This work tackles scene understanding for outdoor robotic navigation, solely relying on images captured by an on-board camera. Conventional visual scene understanding interprets the environment based on specific descriptive categories. However, such a representation is not directly interpretable for decision-making and constrains robot operation to a specific domain. Thus, we propose to segment egocentric images directly in terms of how a robot can navigate in them, and tailor the learning problem to an autonomous navigation task. Building around an image segmentation network, we present a generic affordance consisting of 3 driveability levels which can broadly apply to both urban and off-road scenes. By encoding these levels with soft ordinal labels, we incorporate inter-class distances during learning which improves segmentation compared to standard "hard" one-hot labelling. In addition, we propose a navigation-oriented pixel-wise loss weighting method which assigns higher importance to safety-critical areas. We evaluate our approach on large-scale public image segmentation datasets ranging from sunny city streets to snowy forest trails. In a cross-dataset generalization experiment, we show that our affordance learning scheme can be applied across a diverse mix of datasets and improves driveability estimation in unseen environments compared to general-purpose, single-dataset segmentation., Comment: Accepted in Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L 2022). Supplementary video available at https://youtu.be/q_XfjUDO39Y

Monitoring the occupancy of public sports facilities is essential to assess their use and to motivate their construction in new places. In the case of a football field, the area to cover is large, thus several regular cameras should be used, which makes the setup expensive and complex. As an alternative, we developed a system that detects players from a unique cheap and wide-angle fisheye camera assisted by a single narrow-angle thermal camera. In this work, we train a network in a knowledge distillation approach in which the student and the teacher have different modalities and a different view of the same scene. In particular, we design a custom data augmentation combined with a motion detection algorithm to handle the training in the region of the fisheye camera not covered by the thermal one. We show that our solution is effective in detecting players on the whole field filmed by the fisheye camera. We evaluate it quantitatively and qualitatively in the case of an online distillation, where the student detects players in real time while being continuously adapted to the latest video conditions., Comment: Accepted for the CVSports workshop of CVPR 2020 ; 8 pages + references

In video understanding, action spotting consists in temporally localizing human-induced events annotated with single timestamps. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function that specifically considers the temporal context naturally present around each action, rather than focusing on the single annotated frame to spot. We benchmark our loss on a large dataset of soccer videos, SoccerNet, and achieve an improvement of 12.8% over the baseline. We show the generalization capability of our loss for generic activity proposals and detection on ActivityNet, by spotting the beginning and the end of each activity. Furthermore, we provide an extended ablation study and display challenging cases for action spotting in soccer videos. Finally, we qualitatively illustrate how our loss induces a precise temporal understanding of actions and show how such semantic knowledge can be used for automatic highlights generation., Comment: Accepted for CVPR2020 main conference. This document contains 8 pages + references + supplementary material