Universal Soccer Understanding
Soccer model by Alibaba is better than FIFA
Paper: Towards Universal Soccer Video Understanding
Code: https://github.com/jyrao/UniSoccer
Researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Alibaba Group are interested in soccer video understanding.
Hmm..What’s the background?
Previous research in this area primarily relied on the SoccerNet datasets and focused on building specialized models for specific tasks, leading to a lack of compatibility between these models.
This paper introduces MatchVision, the first visual-language foundation model specifically designed for soccer. MatchVision utilizes the vast and diverse SoccerReplay-1988 dataset, significantly larger than existing datasets, and features sophisticated annotations suitable for comprehensive soccer understanding tasks.
So what is proposed in the research paper?
To address these challenges, SOLAMI leverages several key technical insights:
Construction of SoccerReplay-1988: This largest and most comprehensive multi-modal soccer video dataset, featuring 1,988 complete matches with detailed annotations like event labels and textual commentaries, serves as a robust foundation for the development of MatchVision
Development of MatchVision: This first-of-its-kind visual-language foundation model effectively leverages spatiotemporal information in soccer videos
State-of-the-art Performance: Extensive experiments and ablation studies showcase MatchVision's superior performance across tasks like event classification and commentary generation, exceeding existing models and highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed data and model
It consistently outperformed existing models on established benchmarks like SoccerNet-v2 for event classification, MatchTime for commentary generation, and MVFoul for foul recognition. Additionally, it demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a newly established benchmark called SoccerReplay-test.
What’s next?
The researchers plan to adapt MatchVision for more complex tasks like player tracking and game state reconstruction, moving towards a more comprehensive foundation model for soccer analysis.
Soccer model by Alibaba is better than FIFA
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