With hairdos like Colon Kaputnick, the AI camera won't mistake the officials for soccer balls. This won't however, change many fans' perspective that the officials are not as smart as the soccer ball!
Posted on 11/06/2020 11:50:41 AM PST by Red Badger
Technology and sports have a fairly mixed relationship already. Log on to Twitter during a soccer match (or football as it's properly known*) and as well as people tweeting ambiguous statements like "YESSS" and "oh no mate" to about 20,000 inexplicable retweets, you'll likely see a lot of complaints about the video assistant referee (VAR) and occasionally goal-line technology not doing its job.
Fans of Scottish football team Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC experienced a new hilarious technological glitch during a match last weekend, but in all honesty, you'd be hard-pressed to say it didn't improve the viewing experience dramatically.
The club announced a few weeks ago it was moving from using human camera operators to cameras controlled by AI. The club proudly announced at the time the new "Pixellot system uses cameras with in-built, AI, ball-tracking technology" and would be used to capture HD footage of all home matches at Caledonian Stadium, which would be broadcast directly to season-ticket holders' homes.
Cut to last Saturday, when the robot cameras were given a new challenge that hadn't been foreseen: A linesman with a bald head.
The AI camera appeared to mistake the man's bald head for the ball for a lot of the match, repeatedly swinging back to follow the linesman instead of the actual game. Many viewers complained they missed their team scoring a goal because the camera "kept thinking the Lino bald head was the ball," and some even suggested the club would have to provide the linesman with a toupe or hat.
With no fans allowed in the stadium due to Covid-19 restrictions, the fans of Inverness Caledonian Thistle FC and their opponents Ayr United could only watch via the cameras, and so were treated to mostly a view of the linesman's head instead of any exciting moments of the match that were occurring off-camera, though some fans saw this as a bonus given the usual quality of performance.
As you can see from the highlight reel above, the AI-operated camera continuously follows the linesman's head, particularly struggling as the ball falls down towards the ground near him. You can practically hear its thought process: "ball ball ball bald head, there's a bald head, zoom in on the bald head."
The object recognition technology could clearly do with a bit of a tweak, or else the team might actually have to implement the policy of bald referees being forced to wear a sombrero to differentiate themselves from the ball.
*It may surprise you to know IFLScience is based in the UK, not the US.
To prevent this from happening, they should consider making soccer balls with a distinctive color scheme. Maybe alternating areas of black and white so that they look nothing like a guy’s bald head.
We had to watch a miserable HS football game on livestream with one of these “smart” cameras....every big play it would turn and point to the road when a car went by. Awful.
Easy - make the refs wear those “pussy hats” that were all the rage a few demonstrations ago.
Sounds more like AS to me (artificial stupidity)
Hilarious.
Make the bald guys but that black eye stuff football players use on their head.....................
I enjoyed and had a good laugh at this thread.
Another example of: “TODAYS SOLUTION IS TOMORROW’S PROBLEM”. LOL -Tom
That’s hilarious!
Some things were just not meant to shine.
We still have two months to go...................
Well where’s the fun in that.
How many times will this stupid story be posted on the Freep?
With hairdos like Colon Kaputnick, the AI camera won't mistake the officials for soccer balls. This won't however, change many fans' perspective that the officials are not as smart as the soccer ball!
Let's hope that, now that "2020" has broken all the records for Worst-This and Worst-That and Worst-The-Other, that it is content to just run out the clock.
I really, really, am tired of 2020.
In 458 BC, he returned to Sicily for the last time, visiting the city of Gela, where he died in 456 or 455 BC. Valerius Maximus wrote that he was killed outside the city by a tortoise dropped by an eagle (possibly a lammergeier or Cinereous vulture, which do open tortoises for eating by dropping them on hard objects[22]) which had mistaken his head for a rock suitable for shattering the shell.[23] Pliny, in his Naturalis Historiæ, adds that Aeschylus had been staying outdoors to avoid a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object
That. Is so funny.
They should have thrown a hat on the dude. But how funny is that!?
LOL, I’ve never cared about sports, but that is funny as hell.
AGAIN?
This title came up at least a week ago!
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