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Comment by blorenz | Hacker News Reader

Love this! I play recreational ice hockey in an Adult league and for the past many years I've desired to use AI/Object recognition to recognize who was out on the ice during what times during the game to attribute who impacted goals and which players were taking longer than usual shifts ( every team has those one or two players!).

This may be achievable for me with the current state of AI and GPT to help fill the gaps that my knowledge is lacking in. Thanks for showing what you made and how you did it. It's encouragement to me.

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The NHL just sticks an airtag equivalent into the jerseys.

Sometimes you can notice a little nob on the back/shoulder of a player.

https://www.google.com/search?q=nhl+player+tracking+jersey

https://old.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/u5707w/wha...

This would be interesting, feel free to email me if you get stuck. If you had a camera at eye level, you could try to train it on recognizing the player jersey numbers.

Facial recognition would be better. Don’t forget that canonically in Mighty Ducks D2 Goldberg and Russ switched jerseys so that Russ could get his infamous “Knuckle Puck” shot off undisputed because everyone thought the puck was passed to Goldberg until the mask came off. So the ML training on jerseys would have missed this critical moment and potentially assigned the score to Goldberg, when really it was Russ (wearing Goldberg’s jersey) who should have gotten the credit.

One might argue that this sort of thing rarely happens so it’s not worth doing more complex facial recognition vis a vis Jersey numbering. But I say that while it may be rare, when it does happen it’s a major event, so no complexity should be spared to ensure we capture it accurately.

Typically beer league players wear full face cages so facial recognition is harder to do

I would have multiple camera footage. One gopro would be just be a wide-angle of the bench behind the players, another would be on the game clock, and additional ones would be on-ice footage. Typically my gopro set-up has been behind the goalie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCavsdzc-OY) and the rinks have Livebarn feeds (here's one on my YT from 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WEE9y4cAHg) but there are challenges in quality abound.

I play in a rec soccer league and had a similar idea, except to also have everyone on the team wear a smartwatch that could intelligently buzz at you to sub out based on your heartrate and how long you've been in.

should give this to the coach too - Texas players get heat exhaustion

Trace and hudl use shirt number and person tracking. I bet they could add skin color and gait analysis to do this as well.

If only LiveBarn feeds weren’t such a pile of crap I’d have some hope.

Iirc, LiveBarn offers this as a service if your local rink has it set up. Annoyingly, my local rink uses 30 minute video slots so it only ever captures half a game.

This has already been possible for a decade.

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