Analysing ice hockey videos with deep learning

Researchers at the University of Waterloo are developing technology to automatically analyse videos of hockey games using artificial intelligence. Their deep-learning technique can identify players by their sweater numbers with 90 percent 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 PhD 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 an industry partner on AI software to analyse player performance and produce other data-driven insights.