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
Adrien Deliège
Postdoc Researcher at Uliege(Belgium)
Lead organizer
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
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
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
Researcher on sports-related projects and advertisements