The DeepSportradar Cricket Bowl Release Challenge (2023)

Welcome to the first edition of the DeepSportradar Cricket Bowl Release Challenge, which is one of the ACM MMSports 2023 Workshop challenges. An opportunity to publish, as well as winning a $1000 prize by competing on EvalAI. See this page for more details about our challenges.

These challenges are associated with the 6th International ACM Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports. In this challenge, participants will have to segment the input video to recognize the bowl release action.

On the Challenge name

The dataset annotations (see below session) contain the events describing the bowler actions: "is bowling" and the proper "ball release". We decided to merge these two actions as we're interested in both of them. Therefore, the dataset name on Kaggle and the Challenge name itself are called "bowl release" which is probably technically not correct but gives the idea of the task.

Data

Data have been annotated internally by Sportradar. The dataset is a collection of cricket videos, which are already publicly available, with about "2 overs" of a cricket game. Annotations provide the action type "is bowling" or "bowl release" in the "event" key. The bounding boxes of players and their role are also provided under the key "person". This dataset has been curated and provided by Sportradar.

NOTE: The challenge set has been released! Please download the latest version from Kaggle!

The dataset is available on Kaggle. It can be downloaded and unzipped manually in a folder (i.e. cricket-bowlrelease-dataset) of the project. The dataset contains a total of 40 videos and 26 annotation files: 26 videos are annotated (18 for training and 8 for testing) and 14 videos are with annotations for the challenge.

We will here download it programmatically. First install the kaggle CLI.

pip install kaggle

Go to your Kaggle Account page and click on Create new API Token to download the file to be saved as ~/.kaggle/kaggle.json for authentication.

kaggle datasets download dzambrano/cricket-bowlrelease-dataset
mkdir cricket-bowlrelease-dataset
unzip -qo ./cricket-bowlrelease-dataset.zip -d cricket-bowlrelease-dataset

The dataset is split into training, test and challenge sets. Annotations will be provided for the first two splits and hidden for the latter. Data have been annotated internally by Sportradar. Videos are extracted from real matches and consist in about two "overs". The dataset are relased publicly, under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 LICENCE, for research purposes only.

The objective of this challenge is to segment the specific parts of videos where a bowl release action occurs, focusing on detecting the full time window of the action. This differs from other action detection tasks, that treat actions as single moments in time. Typically lasting around 100 frames, the event detection aims to identify all instances of bowl release events.

Metrics

As the challenge objective is to identify all instances of bowl release, we decided to treat the problem as instance segmentation through time. For this reason, we use the Panoptic Quality as metric.

Panoptic Quality is a metric used to evaluate the performance of instance segmentation algorithms in computer vision. Instance segmentation involves identifying and delineating individual objects within an image, assigning each pixel to a specific object instance. Here we want to measure the model ability to identify and delineate individual bowl releases action instances, assigning each frame to a specific action event instance.

Panoptic Quality combines two key aspects of instance segmentation: segmentation quality and recognition quality. It measures the accuracy of both the object boundary delineation (segmentation quality) and the correct association of each segment with the corresponding object category (recognition quality).

To calculate Panoptic Quality, the algorithm's output is compared against ground truth annotations. The metric takes into account true positives (correctly segmented and recognized action events), false positives (over-segmented or misclassified action events), and false negatives (missed action events). It assigns scores based on the intersection over union (IoU) between the algorithm's segmentation masks and the ground truth masks. In this challenge we only consider IoUs when above to the 0.5 threshold.

Panoptic Quality is computed using the following formula:

Panoptic Quality = PQ = $\frac{\sum_{(p,g)\in{TP}}IoU(p,g)}{|TP| + \frac{1}{2}|FP| + \frac{1}{2}|FN|}.$

Where:

• IoU is the Intersection Over Union ratios for all true positives.
• TP is the number of true positives.
• FP is the number of false positives.
• FN is the number of false negatives.

The matric can be further broken in:

Panoptic Quality (PQ) = Segmentation Quality (SQ) x Recognition Quality (RQ) = $\frac{\sum_{(p,g)\in{TP}}IoU(p,g)}{|TP|} \times \frac{|TP|}{|TP| + \frac{1}{2}|FP| + \frac{1}{2}|FN|}$ .

Please refer to the Submission on EvalAI section for the submission format.

Maintainers: Davide Zambrano (d.zambrano@sportradar.com) from Sportradar.

 

Installation

Note that the file setup.py specifies the libraries version to use to run the code.

Install PyTorch.

git clone https://github.com/DeepSportradar/cricket-bowl-release-challenge.git
cd cricket-bowl-release-challenge
pip install -e .

Example

Run the following command to train a baseline model:

python main.py --epochs 50

Submission on EvalAI

Submit your result through the challenge page on the EvalAI platform.

The submission file has to be a json with the following format:

{
    "video_0": {"0": [10, 100], "1": [350, 400]},
    "video_1": {"0": [100, 200], "1": [350, 450]},
    "video_n": {"0": [1000, 1100], "1": [350, 450]}
}

Where:

• the keys identify the videos in the split;
• then for each video, a Dict is expected with unique identifiers for each detected action;
• each detected action is represented by a list containing the starting and ending frames for that action.

Please refer to the challenge webpage for complete rules, timelines and awards: https://deepsportradar.github.io/challenge.html.

License

• This repository is distributed under the Apache 2.0 License.
• The challenge data is hosted on Kaggle and available under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Questions and remarks

If you have any question or remark regarding the challenge and related materials, please raise a GitHub issue in this repository, or contact us directly on Discord. You can also drop an email to deep@sportradar.com .