Bib Recognition for Sports Photographers (Read 1621 times)

Pretty slick.  I'm not a potential customer (I don't do sports-photos, just street), but if I were, I'd like to read about the estimated accuracy of your process.  Estimated percent of false-positive, or missed tags.  Is there any way that the software indicates that it isn't sure of a number?  Or that there was a bib in the photo, but it couldn't read the bib?  A simple green, yellow, red confidence level associated with each of the bibs would be nice.  This would allow the photog to manually address anything the processing thought it missed; a missed bib is potentially a missed sale.

The tool itself looks very simple from the demo; nice work.

Also, something you should address in your advert - how does the processor handle when a digit of the bib is covered by an arm or something?  Does a 1234 become 234?

This is something the confidence indicator should give a "yellow" to if the processor is able to detect the situation at all.

Good luck with your product!

Extending this to videos would be a whole 'nother ball of wax wouldn't it?

Yes, and no. There's a lot of computational wizardry (read: math) going on behind the scenes regarding computer vision. If the algorithms can work for images, there is a good possibility to extend them towards video as well.

The website is an attempt to gauge interest and solicit interesting feedback like you and stadjak have posted.

There are a lot of options regarding partial bibs, or a shot of a person w/o the bib. That's were things get more and more complicated... all of the edge cases. Coupling the bib recognition (this is much more than just OCR) methods, with facial recognition, yields very promising results.

I want to know that there's a worthwhile interest in it before I pour in some more serious effort. It is fun to work on though!

MT, photo-red type systems use an actual human to verify license plate matches before anything is sent out.  I can't speak for every state, but I know the two I looked into both required that human check.

Overall, looks sweet.  Great idea, if you can prove the statistics, I'm sure you'll have a lot customers

Don't all the major running photo companies, such as marathonphoto, already use something like this?

Anyway. Here is what I would love, as an RD. I have a stack of photos and the database with race numbers and email addresses. I'd love to have the program ID the photo and match it to the email address, then email the photo (or a message) to the runner.

Don't all the major running photo companies, such as marathonphoto, already use something like this?

 

Anyway. Here is what I would love, as an RD. I have a stack of photos and the database with race numbers and email addresses. I'd love to have the program ID the photo and match it to the email address, then email the photo (or a message) to the runner.

Trent, that's what I'm trying to figure out, however the answer from everyone i've spoken to seems to be: "they correlate photograph timestamps with when a bib crossed a check point.

This works decently for large races, with multiple checkpoints. Anything without that big time setup, or any pictures taken in between the checkpoints have to be done manually.

Once the technology is in place, there are a lot of great options for it, just like you mentioned. There's even the possibility of having a photobooth at a race where people search for their bib# right after the race and print the photos an hour after they've finished. 

Everyone seems to be looking for tech like this, but no one seems to be able to provide it, because the barrier to entry is high, and perhaps because the market just isn't there. That last part is what I'm most interested in. 

So thank you both for the feedback, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.