Team

Team history

The first version of SoccerNet was released in 2018 by Silvio Giancola at the CVsports workshop at CVPR.  At the beginning, the dataset contained 500 broadcast games on which 3 classes of events where annotated for the action spotting task (goals, cards and substitutions). Quickly, Anthony Cioppa and Adrien Deliège joined the SoccerNet team with a first collaboration on an Action Spotting technique published at CVPR.  

With their supervisors Marc Van Droogenbroeck and Bernard Ghanem, they funded a vast annotation campaign in collaboration with Prof. Thomas B. Moeslund (Aalborg University) to extend the set of events from 3 classes to 17 classes,  covering all possible actions in the games,. Furthermore, they annotated camera cuts and replay information to propose the novel task of replay grounding. They were joined by Meisam Jamshidi Seikavandi ,Jacob V. Dueholm and Kamal Nasrollahi to work on these tasks and propose the first baselines. This dataset, called at that time SoccerNet-v2, was published at the CVsports workshop at CVPR 2021 and won a best paper award. At this same conference, they organised two challenges related to action spotting and replay grounding at the ActivityNet workshop.

Following the success of the challenges, Marc Van Droogenbroeck with the DeepSport project funded a novel vast annotation campaign to annotate player bounding boxes,  camera correspondances and field lines on the SoccerNet broadcast games. Baidu Research, with Zhiyu Cheng, Le Kang and Xin Zhou, joined the crew for the new player tracking task. EVS Broadcast Equipment, with Floriane Magera in the lead, took care of defining the camera calibration task and proposed a first baseline method. Vladimir Somers from UCLouvain, EPFL and SportRadar described the re-identification task and proposed a first benchmark.  This allowed the team to propose 4 challenges including: Player Tracking, Camera Calibration, Player Re-Identification and Action Spotting at CVPR 2022.

In 2023, Hassan Mkhallati joined the crew as lead researcher on the dense video captioning task. Vladimir Somers also proposes a new jersey number recognition task. Thanks to footovision, the SoccerNet team is able to propose a new challenge on ball action spotting, with fine-grained dense temporal annotations. Finally Floriane Magera proposes an improvement of the camera calibration challenge by providing more data and more annotations. All these tasks are featured as guest challenges of the 2023 CVSports workshop at CVPR.

In 2024, two new members, Victor and Abolfazl, joined the team of the game state reconstruction task, and NASK Science, represented by Karolina, Mateusz, Zuzanna, and Michał, proposed a new ball action spotting task.

Meet our collaborators

Marc Van Droogenbroeck


Professor at ULiège(Belgium)
Lead supervisor

Adrien Deliège


Postdoc Researcher at Uliege(Belgium)
Lead organizer

Silvio Giancola


Research Scientist at KAUST(Saudi Arabia)
Lead organizer

Anthony Cioppa


Postdoc Researcher at Uliège(Belgium)
Lead organizer

Bernard Ghanem


Associate Professor at KAUST(Saudi Arabia)
Lead supervisor

Meisam Jamshidi Seikavandi


PhD fellow at IT University of Copenhagen(Denmark)
Lead researcher on the grounding task

Jacob V. Dueholm


PhD Candidate Aalborg University(Denmark)
Lead researcher on the camera task

Kamal Nasrollahi


Aalborg University/ Milestone Systems(Denmark)
Supervisor on the spotting and grounding tasks

Thomas B. Moeslund


Professor at Aalborg University(Denmark)
Supervisor on the spotting and grounding tasks

Vladimir Somers


PhD fellow at UCLouvain, EPFL and ML Engineer at SportRadar(Belgium, Switzerland)
Lead researcher on the re-identification task

Floriane Magera


Innovation engineer at EVS Broadcast Equipment(Belgium)
Lead researcher on the camera calibration task

Olivier Barnich


Head of Innovation at EVS Broadcast Equipment(Belgium)
Supervisor on the camera calibration task

Zhiyu Cheng


Senior Researcher at Baidu Research(USA)
Researcher on the tracking task

Le Kang


Senior Researcher at Baidu Research(USA)
Researcher on the tracking task

Xin Zhou


Senior Researcher at Baidu Research(USA)
Lead researcher on the tracking task

Hassan Mkhallati


Master Student at Polytech Paris (France) and ULB (Belgium)
Lead researcher on the dense video captioning task

Jan Held


Master Student at ULiège
Lead researcher on multi-view projects

Carlos Hinojosa

Postdoc Researcher at KAUST(Saudi Arabia)
Researcher on sports-related projects and advertisements

Victor Joos

Research Assistant at UCLouvain(Belgium)
Lead  researcher on the game state reconstruction task

Seyed Abolfazl Ghasemzadeh

PhD student at ICTEAM/UCLouvain, FRIA, FNRS researcher  (Belgium)
Lead  researcher on the game state reconstruction task

Karolina Seweryn

Senior Researcher at NASK & PhD Candidate at TIB PAN (Poland)
Lead  researcher on the ball action spotting task

Mateusz Kowalczyk

ML Engineer at NASK (Poland)
Lead  researcher on the ball action spotting task

Zuzanna Mróz

ML Engineer at NASK (Poland)
Lead  researcher on the ball action spotting task

Michał Hałoń

Head of the Department of Image Processing at NASK (Poland)
Researcher on sports-related projects and advertisements

They Trust US

We would like to thank our funding organisms

And we would also like to thank our sponsors

Finally, we would also like to thank our collaborators