OCR and Facial Recognition for Sports Photography

[Ian_Feldmann]

Greetings, as its my first time on Adobe forums Ill give a run down of who I am, if this doesn't matter skip the next paragraph.

My name is Ian, I work as a college sports photographer mainly with two Universities (UMBC and Towson in Baltimore) as well as a few professional and club teams.  Thus I have photographed the same teams for years and have a lot of images of each player.  I shoot Nikon (doesn't really matter) but shoot almost everything in RAW if possible and then cull in PhotoMechanic and edit and organize in Lightroom sorting and flagging using a combination of ratings and color labels to sort my best photos and highlights for each event.  Thus I can quickly find my best photos and through metadata sorting the best photos or my exported highlights for each event or date.

An issue Ive been trying to work around is finding all of my photos of a specific player or player number.  I get asked weekly by our Sports department or players or parents themselves for photos of a specific player and I have to go through manually and find them if its even worth the effort.  I ave messed around with Lightroom's and even Google Photo's facial recognition but in the end it takes a lot of time to manually enter player names and isn't the most accurate, facial recognition also doesn't identify the back of someone's head or their face under a helmet and some of my best shots are of that variety where they simply don't have an identifiable face in them.  My idea for this is a plugin for Lightroom or a completely separate application that uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to find Numbers instead of faces in photos and tag them with those numbers by embedding it in their metadata.  I have no idea if this already exists in some form but I haven't been able to find it.  I know that I genuinely need something like this for the future because once my catalogs get big enough I simply wont be able to find ALL of my pictures of a player.  This is definitely an application for OCR that's limited to sports photography where players are required to have a text character prominently displayed but I can imagine marathon photographers use similar technology to identify based on the number on a bib (unless they're doing that by hand for thousands of people).  I'm interested in any solutions other photographers have made use of and/or if you think this technology could work.  Thanks for reading this.

[cmgap]

Clever and well described. I wish I were a plugin developer as this type of  intelligence in the app would be useful. If artificial intelligence can find a dolphin in an image it would be great if it could also find a number 47 on a helmet or shirt...

[johnrellis]

The Any Vision plugin uses Google’s Cloud Vision to recognize objects, places, logos, and text. The OCR isn’t perfect but a number of sports-event photographers find it useful for extracting bib and jersey numbers. See in particular the documentation on the Advanced tab for extracting numbers.

Any Vision Lightroom Plugin

[cmgap]

Thanks for posting that info/link John!

[SpazGenev]

Hey there! I am a motorsports photographer. I'm focusing on MotoGP and Formula 1 in particular and have been fighting the same issue for a few years now.

I kinda developed an app that pulls data from a database and can actually structure captions based on the selected drivers, circuit, date and so on, but it's very focused on motorsports and it's still not very user friendly. I mean, you have to generate your own gallery through git hub, and then fire off the whole project with Node.js.

I am not a developer and getting the thing this far was a big ask. And in the end you still need to go through all the images you've slected, but at least all the captions, titles and keywords are generated and inserted with one click.

Here is a sample of the metadata generated by the thing: https://www.spasgp.com/Formula-1/2019-F1-Round-14-Italian-Grand-Prix/FP2-Monza-Italy/i-Tpt4BMw/A

[shanebailey2000]

Did you ever find a solution to this?  I shoot a lot of ice hockey photos and would very much like to have a much more solid way of doing this as well.   I have tried Any Vision and surely it was user error, but my results were not great.  I have tens of thousands of photos of and having the jersey number(s) of each player in each photo auto tagged or even in the file name would be amazing.  Thanks.

[SpazGenev]

Sadly, no. It would be great if Adobe just implement a way in which you can enter a few keywords and by clicking "enter" you insert them and move onto the next picture. I mean, this is again a lot of work, but it'll save clicks. If you multiply the number of extra clicks we make now by 100 images or 1000 it gets ugly...

[Nico Sportvision]

Hi all. Actually I'm currently developing a Lightroom plugin for that. I'm polishing some details but it is functionnal. I'm working on the website for the moment.
Basically it performs a recognition based on AI system on the photos to detect the jersey number.
By example you can see on the photo here: shorturl.at/FQSW6
The NBA players's numbers are recognized and tagged in a dedicated metadata field. If you want to look after a specific player, you can then type in the searchbar of Lightroom the number you are looking for.

Is it a suitable solution? I would be happy to discuss the features you would like to find in such a plugin.

[Nico Sportvision]

The image link expired. Here is the image capture I wanted to share

[ccharpinphoto]

Wow !
I'm looking for a solution like this !
Any chance to try it as beta too 🙂

[Nico Sportvision]

Hi, you can register here  https://www.sportvisionai.com/register 
If youe ncounter any issue, please contact support. There is a form in the support section. I will reply as fast as possible 🙂

[shanebailey2000]

I would love to be a beta tester for you on this project.  I am curious though. I see that LUA is used but assume that is just the interface. What language did you use to do the actual work?

[Nico Sportvision]

Hi! I will try to give you an access this week.
Technology wise, LUA is indeed use for the Lightroom plugin interface. Then the treatment is done on a dedicated server. I use mainly Java

[shanebailey2000]

I am definitely still interested in this project.  I am a full stack developer if I can be of any help 🙂 Minimally I could beta test it.  I have approximately 250K shots we can test this on 😛

[Nico Sportvision]

Hi, finally I have something to show 🙂

You can register here: https://www.sportvisionai.com/register 
You should have 2000 credits to test. If you encounter any issue, don't hesitate to send an email in the support section, I will reply as fast as possible!

[Andy22134813r4rj]

Hello, ive been searching for a solution like this and ran across this thread! my team and I shoot roughly 20,000 photos per weekend of motocross and are in big need of a way to look up contestant's photos via their bike numbers. I tried the links you posted but they dont seem to work?

[Nico Sportvision]

Hi,

Indeed, I paused the project because of the Covid. A lot of activities were paused.

I plan to relaunch the project soon. You can subscribe on the main page if you want to be alerted when the application is available again: https://www.sportvisionai.com

[Sam22758515zs03]

Hi,

I am also looking at this as a an opion for my sports photos. The link doesnt apppear to work.

[Nico Sportvision]

Hi,
Sorry there was a typo in the adress. Here is the right one: https://www.sportvisionai.com/

I'm currently working on restoring the application an the registration.

[Bubb23671964m7nk]

Can i pay you to try this software? it would save me hours and hours. I shoot about 14,000 photos every saturday and if i could sort them by jersey number i would turn 5 hours of work into how ever long your program would take. Please and thank you. 

[shanebailey2000]

That's the thing, I do not have software for this either.... if you find
any please let me know.

[Bubb23671964m7nk]

i did actually! with very detailed instructions. heres the link
https://johnrellis.com/lightroom/anyvision.htm#pricing

[shanebailey2000]

Did you actually get this to work for jerseys? I tried this out and it
matched maybe 1/3 of the jerseys due to angles and folds in the jerseys etc.

[Nico Sportvision]

Hi everybody,

I finally relaunched the project. If you had an account, the account is still available.
A new version of the plugin is available and downloadable directly from your Dashboard: https://www.sportvisionai.com/dashboard
What changed since last time?

Improved AI

The AI has been trained with new models and has a better recognition accuracy even with the most challenging fonts. Below you can see an example that was failing before.

New feature

Sometimes, the software doesn't detect any number in the image. When you just analyzed thousands of images, you want to know which images you need to manually tag.
A new field has been introduced in the Adobe Lightroom plugin, so you can search these images.

You can search this status in the integrated Adobe Lightroom search bar.
In case an image has been processed, but number has been found, the status will be "PROCESSED_NO_NUMBERS"