From Broadcast to Minimap: Achieving State-of-the-Art SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction
This work addresses the challenge of precise player tracking for coaches and analysts in sports video understanding, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing detection and tracking frameworks.
The paper tackled the problem of Game State Reconstruction (GSR) in soccer using a single-camera setup, achieving state-of-the-art results by winning the SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction Challenge 2024 and significantly outperforming other methods.
Game State Reconstruction (GSR), a critical task in Sports Video Understanding, involves precise tracking and localization of all individuals on the football field-players, goalkeepers, referees, and others - in real-world coordinates. This capability enables coaches and analysts to derive actionable insights into player movements, team formations, and game dynamics, ultimately optimizing training strategies and enhancing competitive advantage. Achieving accurate GSR using a single-camera setup is highly challenging due to frequent camera movements, occlusions, and dynamic scene content. In this work, we present a robust end-to-end pipeline for tracking players across an entire match using a single-camera setup. Our solution integrates a fine-tuned YOLOv5m for object detection, a SegFormer-based camera parameter estimator, and a DeepSORT-based tracking framework enhanced with re-identification, orientation prediction, and jersey number recognition. By ensuring both spatial accuracy and temporal consistency, our method delivers state-of-the-art game state reconstruction, securing first place in the SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction Challenge 2024 and significantly outperforming competing methods.