Artificial intelligence makes it faster, easier to analyze hockey video

Researchers have made a key advancement in the development of technology to automatically analyze video of hockey games using artificial intelligence. Engineers at the University of Waterloo combined two existing deep-learning AI techniques to identify players by their sweater numbers with 90-per-cent accuracy. "That is significant because the only major cue you have to identify a particular player in a hockey video is jersey number," said Kanav Vats, a Ph.D. student in systems design engineering who led the project. "Players on a team otherwise appear very similar because of their helmets and uniforms." Player identification is one aspect of a complicated challenge as members of the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab at Waterloo work with industry partner Stathletes Inc. on AI software to analyze player performance and produce other data-driven insights.