Ice hockey player identification via transformers and weakly supervised learning

Identifying players in video is a foundational step in computer vision-based sports analytics. Obtaining player identities is essential for analyzing the game and is used in downstream tasks such as game event recognition. Transformers are the existing standard in natural language processing (NLP) and are swiftly gaining traction in computer vision. Motivated by the increasing success of transformers in computer vision, we introduce a transformer network for recognizing players through their jersey numbers in broadcast National Hockey League (NHL) videos. The transformer takes temporal sequences of player frames (called player tracklets) as input and outputs the probabilities of jersey numbers present in the frames. The proposed network performs better than the previous benchmark on the same dataset. We implement a weakly-supervised training approach by generating approximate frame-level labels for jersey number presence and use the frame-level labels for faster training. We also utilize player shifts available in the NHL play-by-play data by reading the game time using optical character recognition (OCR) to get the players on the ice rink at a certain game time. Using player-shifts improved the player identification accuracy by 6%.