SoccerSynth Field: enhancing field detection with synthetic data from virtual soccer simulator

Field detection in team sports is an essential task in sports video analysis. However, collecting large-scale and diverse real-world datasets for training detection models is often cost and time-consuming. Synthetic datasets, which allow controlled variability in lighting, textures, and camera angles, will be a promising alternative for addressing these problems. This study addresses the challenges of high costs and difficulties in collecting real-world datasets by investigating the effectiveness of pretraining models using synthetic datasets. In this paper, we propose the effectiveness of using a synthetic dataset (SoccerSynth-Field) for soccer field detection. A synthetic soccer field dataset was created to pretrain models, and the performance of these models was compared with models trained on real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that models pretrained on the synthetic dataset exhibit superior performance in detecting soccer fields. This highlights the effectiveness of synthetic data in enhancing model robustness and accuracy, offering a cost-effective and scalable solution for advancing detection tasks in sports field detection.

AthletePose3D: A Benchmark Dataset for 3D Human Pose Estimation and Kinematic Validation in Athletic Movements

Human pose estimation is a critical task in computer vision and sports biomechanics, with applications spanning sports science, rehabilitation, and biomechanical research. While significant progress has been made in monocular 3D pose estimation, current datasets often fail to capture the complex, high-acceleration movements typical of competitive sports. In this work, we introduce AthletePose3D, a novel dataset designed to address this gap. AthletePose3D includes 12 types of sports motions across various disciplines, with approximately 1.3 million frames and 165 thousand individual postures, specifically capturing high-speed, high-acceleration athletic movements. We evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) monocular 2D and 3D pose estimation models on the dataset, revealing that models trained on conventional datasets perform poorly on athletic motions. However, fine-tuning these models on AthletePose3D notably reduces the SOTA model mean per joint position error (MPJPE) from 214mm to 65mm-a reduction of over 69%. We also validate the kinematic accuracy of monocular pose estimations through waveform analysis, highlighting strong correlations in joint angle estimations but limitations in velocity estimation. Our work provides a comprehensive evaluation of monocular pose estimation models in the context of sports, contributing valuable insights for advancing monocular pose estimation techniques in high-performance sports environments. The dataset, code, and model checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/calvinyeungck/AthletePose3D

OpenSTARLab: Open Approach for Spatio-Temporal Agent Data Analysis in Soccer

Sports analytics has become both more professional and sophisticated, driven by the growing availability of detailed performance data. This progress enables applications such as match outcome prediction, player scouting, and tactical analysis. In soccer, the effective utilization of event and tracking data is fundamental for capturing and analyzing the dynamics of the game. However, there are two primary challenges: the limited availability of event data, primarily restricted to top-tier teams and leagues, and the scarcity and high cost of tracking data, which complicates its integration with event data for comprehensive analysis. Here we propose OpenSTARLab, an open-source framework designed to democratize spatio-temporal agent data analysis in sports by addressing these key challenges. OpenSTARLab includes the Pre-processing Package that standardizes event and tracking data through Unified and Integrated Event Data and State-Action-Reward formats, the Event Modeling Package that implements deep learning-based event prediction, alongside the RLearn Package for reinforcement learning tasks. These technical components facilitate the handling of diverse data sources and support advanced analytical tasks, thereby enhancing the overall functionality and usability of the framework. To assess OpenSTARLab's effectiveness, we conducted several experimental evaluations. These demonstrate the superior performance of the specific event prediction model in terms of action and time prediction accuracies and maintained its robust event simulation performance. Furthermore, reinforcement learning experiments reveal a trade-off between action accuracy and temporal difference loss and show comprehensive visualization. Overall, OpenSTARLab serves as a robust platform for researchers and practitioners, enhancing innovation and collaboration in the field of soccer data analytics.

A Zero-Shot LLM Framework for Automatic Assignment Grading in Higher Education

Automated grading has become an essential tool in education technology due to its ability to efficiently assess large volumes of student work, provide consistent and unbiased evaluations, and deliver immediate feedback to enhance learning. However, current systems face significant limitations, including the need for large datasets in few-shot learning methods, a lack of personalized and actionable feedback, and an overemphasis on benchmark performance rather than student experience. To address these challenges, we propose a Zero-Shot Large Language Model (LLM)-Based Automated Assignment Grading (AAG) system. This framework leverages prompt engineering to evaluate both computational and explanatory student responses without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. The AAG system delivers tailored feedback that highlights individual strengths and areas for improvement, thereby enhancing student learning outcomes. Our study demonstrates the system's effectiveness through comprehensive evaluations, including survey responses from higher education students that indicate significant improvements in motivation, understanding, and preparedness compared to traditional grading methods. The results validate the AAG system's potential to transform educational assessment by prioritizing learning experiences and providing scalable, high-quality feedback.

SoccerSynth-Detection: A Synthetic Dataset for Soccer Player Detection

In soccer video analysis, player detection is essential for identifying key events and reconstructing tactical positions. The presence of numerous players and frequent occlusions, combined with copyright restrictions, severely restricts the availability of datasets, leaving limited options such as SoccerNet-Tracking and SportsMOT. These datasets suffer from a lack of diversity, which hinders algorithms from adapting effectively to varied soccer video contexts. To address these challenges, we developed SoccerSynth-Detection, the first synthetic dataset designed for the detection of synthetic soccer players. It includes a broad range of random lighting and textures, as well as simulated camera motion blur. We validated its efficacy using the object detection model (Yolov8n) against real-world datasets (SoccerNet-Tracking and SportsMoT). In transfer tests, it matched the performance of real datasets and significantly outperformed them in images with motion blur; in pre-training tests, it demonstrated its efficacy as a pre-training dataset, significantly enhancing the algorithm's overall performance. Our work demonstrates the potential of synthetic datasets to replace real datasets for algorithm training in the field of soccer video analysis.

Enhanced Multi-Object Tracking Using Pose-based Virtual Markers in 3x3 Basketball

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is crucial for various multi-agent analyses such as evaluating team sports tactics and player movements and performance. While pedestrian tracking has advanced with Tracking-by-Detection MOT, team sports like basketball pose unique challenges. These challenges include players' unpredictable movements, frequent close interactions, and visual similarities that complicate pose labeling and lead to significant occlusions, frequent ID switches, and high manual annotation costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel pose-based virtual marker (VM) MOT method for team sports, named Sports-vmTracking. This method builds on the vmTracking approach developed for multi-animal tracking with active learning. First, we constructed a 3x3 basketball pose dataset for VMs and applied active learning to enhance model performance in generating VMs. Then, we overlaid the VMs on video to identify players, extract their poses with unique IDs, and convert these into bounding boxes for comparison with automated MOT methods. Using our 3x3 basketball dataset, we demonstrated that our VM configuration has been highly effective, and reduced the need for manual corrections and labeling during pose model training while maintaining high accuracy. Our approach achieved an average HOTA score of 72.3%, over 10 points higher than other state-of-the-art methods without VM, and resulted in 0 ID switches. Beyond improving performance in handling occlusions and minimizing ID switches, our framework could substantially increase the time and cost efficiency compared to traditional manual annotation.

Polynomial time constructive decision algorithm for multivariable quantum signal processing

Quantum signal processing (QSP) and quantum singular value transformation (QSVT) have provided a unified framework for understanding many quantum algorithms, including factorization, matrix inversion, and Hamiltonian simulation. As a multivariable version of QSP, multivariable quantum signal processing (M-QSP) is proposed. M-QSP interleaves signal operators corresponding to each variable with signal processing operators, which provides an efficient means to perform multivariable polynomial transformations. However, the necessary and sufficient condition for what types of polynomials can be constructed by M-QSP is unknown. In this paper, we propose a classical algorithm to determine whether a given pair of multivariable Laurent polynomials can be implemented by M-QSP, which returns True or False. As one of the most important properties of this algorithm, it returning True is the necessary and sufficient condition. The proposed classical algorithm runs in polynomial time in the number of variables and signal operators. Our algorithm also provides a constructive method to select the necessary parameters for implementing M-QSP. These findings offer valuable insights for identifying practical applications of M-QSP.

MulCPred: Learning Multi-modal Concepts for Explainable Pedestrian Action Prediction

Pedestrian action prediction is of great significance for many applications such as autonomous driving. However, state-of-the-art methods lack explainability to make trustworthy predictions. In this paper, a novel framework called MulCPred is proposed that explains its predictions based on multi-modal concepts represented by training samples. Previous concept-based methods have limitations including: 1) they cannot directly apply to multi-modal cases; 2) they lack locality to attend to details in the inputs; 3) they suffer from mode collapse. These limitations are tackled accordingly through the following approaches: 1) a linear aggregator to integrate the activation results of the concepts into predictions, which associates concepts of different modalities and provides ante-hoc explanations of the relevance between the concepts and the predictions; 2) a channel-wise recalibration module that attends to local spatiotemporal regions, which enables the concepts with locality; 3) a feature regularization loss that encourages the concepts to learn diverse patterns. MulCPred is evaluated on multiple datasets and tasks. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that MulCPred is promising in improving the explainability of pedestrian action prediction without obvious performance degradation. Furthermore, by removing unrecognizable concepts from MulCPred, the cross-dataset prediction performance is improved, indicating the feasibility of further generalizability of MulCPred.

Fish Tracking Challenge 2024: A Multi-Object Tracking Competition with Sweetfish Schooling Data

The study of collective animal behavior, especially in aquatic environments, presents unique challenges and opportunities for understanding movement and interaction patterns in the field of ethology, ecology, and bio-navigation. The Fish Tracking Challenge 2024 (https://ftc-2024.github.io/) introduces a multi-object tracking competition focused on the intricate behaviors of schooling sweetfish. Using the SweetFish dataset, participants are tasked with developing advanced tracking models to accurately monitor the locations of 10 sweetfishes simultaneously. This paper introduces the competition's background, objectives, the SweetFish dataset, and the appraoches of the 1st to 3rd winners and our baseline. By leveraging video data and bounding box annotations, the competition aims to foster innovation in automatic detection and tracking algorithms, addressing the complexities of aquatic animal movements. The challenge provides the importance of multi-object tracking for discovering the dynamics of collective animal behavior, with the potential to significantly advance scientific understanding in the above fields.

3D Pose-Based Temporal Action Segmentation for Figure Skating: A Fine-Grained and Jump Procedure-Aware Annotation Approach

Understanding human actions from videos is essential in many domains, including sports. In figure skating, technical judgments are performed by watching skaters' 3D movements, and its part of the judging procedure can be regarded as a Temporal Action Segmentation (TAS) task. TAS tasks in figure skating that automatically assign temporal semantics to video are actively researched. However, there is a lack of datasets and effective methods for TAS tasks requiring 3D pose data. In this study, we first created the FS-Jump3D dataset of complex and dynamic figure skating jumps using optical markerless motion capture. We also propose a new fine-grained figure skating jump TAS dataset annotation method with which TAS models can learn jump procedures. In the experimental results, we validated the usefulness of 3D pose features as input and the fine-grained dataset for the TAS model in figure skating. FS-Jump3D Dataset is available at https://github.com/ryota-skating/FS-Jump3D.