CVPR Daily - Tuesday

DAILY T u e s d a y Workshop Preview 20 6th IEEE International Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports (CVsports) Adrian Hilton and Rikke Gade are two of the organizers of CVsports, the 6th IEEE International Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports. Adrian is the Director of the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing at the University of Surrey in the UK, and Rikke Gade is Associate Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark. They speak to us ahead of the workshop on Friday. The CVsports workshop was established in 2013 and has run at major computer vision conferences like CVPR and ICCV . Now in its sixth edition, it spans a huge range of computer vision technologies related to sport, from player tracking through to extractionof statistics, ball tracking , and analysis of gameplay . There is a whole industry behind exploiting the computer vision advances in this area, and the workshop aims to bring together academic researchers with people from industry, all of whom are advancing in parallel and pushing each other forward. Industry guests always attend with exciting developments to report. For example, last year a speaker from Intel Sports spoke about the tracking technology they are using for gameplay, such as multi-camera systems, and how they see the field progressing over the next decade. They also give exposure to interesting technologies that can be slightly outside of the mainstream of computer vision but that show the challenges of doing something in a real- world setting. “The game doesn’t adapt to the computer vision; the computer vision has to be robust enough to deal with the challenges of the real sports,” Adrian explains. “That’s what drives the whole thing and motivates the research as well.” This year’s workshop features 13 accepted papers and four keynote speakers from both academia and industry. The research papers provide the technical detail, but keynotes give a wider perspective on those and highlight some of the technologies that are being used. One name that stands out is John Smith, an IBM fellow, whom the readers of our magazine certainly remember .