# Efficient tracking of team sport players with few game-specific annotations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [Performance Measures and a Data Set for Multi-Target, Multi-Camera Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01775/) (2016)
- [MOT16: A Benchmark for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00831/) (2016)
- [TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02702/) (2021)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [Tracking without bells and whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05625/) (2019)
- [MOTS: Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03604/) (2019)
- [Learning a Neural Solver for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07515/) (2019)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [Lifted Disjoint Paths with Application in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14550/) (2020)
- [Player Tracking and Identification in Ice Hockey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03090/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Small Soccer Player Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10336/) (2020)
- [Player Identification in Hockey Broadcast Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02429/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [SoccerNet-Caption: Dense Video Captioning for Soccer Broadcasts Commentaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04565/) (2023)
- [VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04617/) (2023)
- [Iterative Scale-Up ExpansionIoU and Deep Features Association for Multi-Object Tracking in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13074/) (2023)
- [SPORTU: A Comprehensive Sports Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08474/) (2024)
- [X-VARS: Introducing Explainability in Football Refereeing with Multi-Modal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06332/) (2024)
- [Towards Active Learning for Action Spotting in Association Football Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04220/) (2023)
- [Multi-task Learning for Joint Re-identification, Team Affiliation, and Role Classification for Sports Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09942/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Learning in Sports Applications: Perception, Comprehension, and Decision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03353/) (2023)
- [TeamTrack: A Dataset for Multi-Sport Multi-Object Tracking in Full-pitch Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13868/) (2024)
- [Towards AI-Powered Video Assistant Referee System (VARS) for Association Football](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12483/) (2024)
- [CLIP-ReIdent: Contrastive Training for Player Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11855/) (2023)
- [Basketball-SORT: An Association Method for Complex Multi-object Occlusion Problems in Basketball Multi-object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19655/) (2024)
- [TrackID3x3: A Dataset and Algorithm for Multi-Player Tracking with Identification and Pose Estimation in 3x3 Basketball Full-court Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18282/) (2025)
- [OSL-ActionSpotting: A Unified Library for Action Spotting in Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01265/) (2024)
- [Investigating Event-Based Cameras for Video Frame Interpolation in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02370/) (2024)
- [Towards Athlete Fatigue Assessment from Association Football Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05636/) (2026)
- [SoccerNet 2026 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07320/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One of the requirements for team sports analysis is to track and recognize players. Many tracking and reidentification methods have been proposed in the context of video surveillance. They show very convincing results when tested on public datasets such as the MOT challenge. However, the performance of these methods are not as satisfactory when applied to player tracking. Indeed, in addition to moving very quickly and often being occluded, the players wear the same jersey, which makes the task of reidentification very complex. Some recent tracking methods have been developed more specifically for the team sport context. Due to the lack of public data, these methods use private datasets that make impossible a comparison with them. In this paper, we propose a new generic method to track team sport players during a full game thanks to few human annotations collected via a semi-interactive system. Non-ambiguous tracklets and their appearance features are automatically generated with a detection and a reidentification network both pre-trained on public datasets. Then an incremental learning mechanism trains a Transformer to classify identities using few game-specific human annotations. Finally, tracklets are linked by an association algorithm. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on a challenging rugby sevens dataset. To overcome the lack of public sports tracking dataset, we publicly release this dataset at https://kalisteo.cea.fr/index.php/free-resources/. We also show that our method is able to track rugby sevens players during a full match, if they are observable at a minimal resolution, with the annotation of only 6 few seconds length tracklets per player.