build a soccer analysis platform

I've been looking for a python project. I've been wanting to introduce myself to the realms of AI and Machine Learning. I love Arsenal. Browsing r/soccer or r/gunners I've seen posts of statistical analysis of matches, players, etc. and I have always been intrigued to make my own metrics or figure out how they do it.

Frankly, I was at a bit of a crossroads with starting this. There are so many pretrained models out there for detecting soccer players, but I am not skilled enough in computer vision yet to get to a point where I can take random teams and convert that training data to Arsenal... at least I don't think. Additionally, I had to decide between using PyTorch, YOLO, Roboflow, etc. which each have their own benefits. I was going to use a pretrained model just to start, but then I found a great YouTube video by Computer Vision Engineer where he provided great resources to find images with annotations and bounding boxes included and how to do it yourself. Based on the positive feedback in the comment section and some boredom I decided to follow along. So, what I've done so far: 1. YouTube2MP4 Arsenal 3 - 1 Liverpool highlights 2. Wrote a python script using opencv to capture an image every 10 frames of the video 3. Annotated ~100 images for a training set using cvat.ai 4. Created a gui using PySide6 and OpenCV which can successfully import videos Now I'm onto the next step of preprocessing and object detection. Although 25% of the way through my milestones, I am keeping my completion level at 10% due to how much more expansion can be done.

Cool it's detecting. Using the annotations I made from the model using cvat, I tried a model via 3, 30, 100, and 1000 epochs. I was worried when I was annotating that the quality of the video would cause me some issues down the line because I only downloaded in 720p -- I think that is still the case. The 1000 epoch run only trained on 244 models because the prior 100 did not show any improvement, (yolov8 default patience value). The main way to tell in the video is that the ball is rarely detected.