SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Results
Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Vladimir Somers, Floriane Magera, Xin Zhou, Hassan Mkhallati, Adrien Deliège, Jan Held, Carlos Hinojosa, Amir M. Mansourian, Pierre Miralles, Olivier Barnich, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, Alexandre Alahi, Bernard Ghanem, Marc Van Droogenbroeck, Abdullah Kamal, Adrien Maglo, Albert Clapés, Amr Abdelaziz, Artur Xarles, Astrid Orcesi, Atom Scott, Bin Liu, Byoungkwon Lim, Chen Chen, Fabian Deuser, Feng Yan, Fufu Yu, Gal Shitrit, Guanshuo Wang, Gyusik Choi, Hankyul Kim, Hao Guo, Hasby Fahrudin, Hidenari Koguchi, Håkan Ardö, Ibrahim Salah, Ido Yerushalmy, Iftikar Muhammad, Ikuma Uchida, Ishay Be'ery, Jaonary Rabarisoa, Jeongae Lee, Jiajun Fu, Jianqin Yin, Jinghang Xu, Jongho Nang, Julien Denize, Junjie Li, Junpei Zhang, Juntae Kim, Kamil Synowiec, Kenji Kobayashi, Kexin Zhang, Konrad Habel, Kota Nakajima, Licheng Jiao, Lin Ma, Lizhi Wang, Luping Wang, Menglong Li, Mengying Zhou, Mohamed Nasr, Mohamed Abdelwahed, Mykola Liashuha, Nikolay Falaleev, Norbert Oswald, Qiong Jia, Quoc-Cuong Pham, Ran Song, Romain Hérault, Rui Peng, Ruilong Chen, Ruixuan Liu, Ruslan Baikulov, Ryuto Fukushima, Sergio Escalera, Seungcheon Lee, Shimin Chen, Shouhong Ding, Taiga Someya, Thomas B. Moeslund, Tianjiao Li, Wei Shen, Wei Zhang, Wei Li, Wei Dai, Weixin Luo, Wending Zhao, Wenjie Zhang, Xinquan Yang, Yanbiao Ma, Yeeun Joo, Yingsen Zeng, Yiyang Gan, Yongqiang Zhu, Yujie Zhong, Zheng Ruan, Zhiheng Li, Zhijian Huang, Ziyu Meng
TL;DR
SoccerNet 2023 reports seven vision-based soccer video understanding tasks organized into broadcast, field, and player themes, with notable novelties in ball action spotting, dense video captioning, and jersey-number recognition. The paper presents task-by-task descriptions, evaluation metrics, leaderboards, and winning methods, highlighting advances such as multi-encoder action spotting, end-to-end tracking, and CLIP-based re-identification. Across tasks, participants achieved substantial improvements over baselines, demonstrating strong progress in action localization, tracking, and cross-view player analysis, while identifying remaining challenges in dense captioning and data efficiency. The work consolidates state-of-the-art techniques for sports-video understanding and outlines directions for future benchmarks and datasets to further advance practical, industrial-grade analytics in soccer.
Abstract
The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.