Soccer Player Recognition using Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision

Groundbreaking features and functionalities are available in sports broadcasting programs, specifically in soccer games, such as post-game analysis, tracking of players, tracking of the ball, and associated teams’ and players’ statistical information. However, viewers don’t have control to choose which features to view on-demand and aren’t able to interact with any of these functionalities. Our system aims for the fundamental system of an on-demand viewer-driven application that would be able to track players on the field, identify formation changes, follow team strategy changes, and gather all statistical information of the player and the team on a single screen. In order to realize such an application, we focus on developing a method to track players on the field using multiple Artificial Intelligence (AI) and computer vision techniques where our application employs facial recognition and jersey number recognition algorithms. As a live soccer game broadcast would have various camera views of the players, our custom-made database contains captured images from different scenarios of camera views such as different angles and zooms of the player and is used to train the model using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our system is scalable to different types of sports, such as basketball, baseball, volleyball, and more where players have their numbers on their jerseys and would be feasible to apply our system since soccer involves more players on the field than other sports games.