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AI that mistook a bald head for a soccer ball
- implying 6y agoI worked for a small startup in copenhagen that worked on this exact problem. Our virtual camera solution was great, and detection of the ball worked most of the time, but white long socks would almost always take the camera's attention. Tracking a fast moving object at a distance is a hard problem indeed
- markstos 6y agoIn this case it seems someone could have asked the referee to wear a hat for the reminder of the game, but no one did. This isn't just a "bad AI" problem, it's failure to plan for a "Plan B" in case automated ball tracking fails for any reason.
- fegu 6y agoSome soccer teams have bald players. Should they also wear hats?
- markstos 6y agoThe AI should be fixed or abandoned in the long term, but it seems a single hat could have made this game much more bearable to watch. Immediate fix now, better long term solution later.
- netsharc 6y agoYear 2060: "Granddad, when did they change the rules of football to say everyone on the field has to wear a dark head covering?"
- mdpye 6y agoPerhaps they can cut personal sponsorship deals, as they'll be getting so much more airtime in future /jk
- cortesoft 6y agoWell, it sounds like there aren’t a lot of support people for lower tier soccer... no camera operators, and no one even watching the camera feed.
- eCa 6y agoClothing in sports is highly regulated. For example, FIFA's Equipment Regulations are a hundred pages long[1]. Match officials in football (soccer, if you so will) very rarely wear hats (I can't remember seeing it even once). I'm surprised that I can't find any mention about headwear worn by match officials in the regulations, but regardless, they couldn't just don any old hat. And as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there are other things that also can trick up AI, like white socks. There are teams that might have had white socks for a hundred years, should they be forced to change their colours to make life easier for the AI? [1] https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload/equipment-regulations-515430.pdf?cloudid=q3drmdesvc8bbmanff8d https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload/equipment-regulation...
- brudgers 6y agoHead coverings for referees would generally be a matter for national football associations as is the case with other parts of the uniform other than FIFA controlled international competitions. In the US, USSF lightened it’s stance on hats at lower levels because of skin and eye cancer cases involving “people everyone knew.” But you won’t see it a high level (e.g. professional matches) and young referees seeking to move up are discouraged from it in practice. And because the parallel system of High School and College officiating allow hats, USSF is probably more open than many national associations. The ADA also creates some legal liability as well that is unique to the US.
- hnick 6y agoDoes AI like this incorporate negative/positive punishment into learning as well as reinforcement? Is there an equivalent of slapping it and saying "No! Bad AI!" so it drops the association more quickly?
- invalidusernam3 6y agoWould making the ball a "unique" colour work? (something that stands out, like magenta)
- skunkworker 6y agoEarlier discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955651
- ben_w 6y agoThe article’s title appears to be a reference to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife...
- bdowling 6y agoThat is a pretty obtuse reference to use without explanation. It’s also an odd choice because it feels weird to call an AI a “who”. Despite AI replacing some human tasks, as with the camera operator here, the technology is not at all what we would consider a person.
- oarabbus_ 6y agoWell, it's a very, very famous book.
- fortran77 6y agoObtuse? It was even made into an opera, among other things. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-xpm-2012-jun-17-la-et-long-beach-opera-review-20120618-story.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-xpm-2012-jun-1...
- Enginerrrd 6y agoNot really. I got it instantly and I've never even read the book.
- LeonB 6y agoI understood the reference, but still felt irritated by the word "who".
- codeulike 6y agoIts a really famous book. And that particular story is about Visual Agnosia so its kind of apt.
- Igelau 6y agoWhen do we call it a "who"? Where is the line? Sometimes I don't go down an aisle if I see the spill monitoring robot in my local grocery store. I think it's annoying, slow, dimwitted, and I can't communicate with it. Sometimes as a joke I'll even stare it in the camera and say "Your mother was a toaster!" Where is the line where I'm no longer just a crazy person, but also a racist?
- logicslave 6y agoIs this going to be the "interesting failure of AI" blog topic for the next year?
- LeonB 6y agoA new and worse case will soon present itself. (Though I think this one will be remembered.)
- rawoke083600 6y agolol i once played with imagenet and sending in Goku headshot (Super Saiyan ) it says it's a pineapple ! I mean I can see why !
- derjames 6y agoMathematica mistook Stephen Wolfram for a plunger during an AI demonstration on the Lex Fridman podcast.
- jjoonathan 6y agoIt passed the Turing Test.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoHey! He's a talented pure mathematician, and is absolutely not a plunger. To assert such is in no way social commentary.
- commandlinefan 6y agoCould be worse. An eagle once mistook Aeschylus's bald head for a rock and dropped a tortoise on it (expecting the rock to smash the tortoise shell), killing Aeschylus. https://www.goldencharter.co.uk/news-and-info/2017/six-strange-deaths-from-history/#:~:text=Aeschylus%2C%20an%20ancient%20Greek%20playwright,the%20shell%20of%20its%20prey https://www.goldencharter.co.uk/news-and-info/2017/six-stran....
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- leetcrew 6y agowhat a tragedy!
- pizza 6y agoInteresting angle for a funeral service ad..
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago> To add a further strange twist to the death of Aeschylus, Roman author Pliny, suggested that Aeschylus had been spending a lot of time outdoors to avoid a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object.
- baobabKoodaa 6y agoI don't get it. If you're worried about being killed by a falling object, wouldn't you want to stay under the cover of a roof?
- Izkata 6y agoYesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955651
- rileymat2 6y agoToday my iPhone suggested that I look at an automated album of home cooked food from my photos. It was working pretty well as I scrolled through and then it came up with some poop on the ground that for some reason I had taken a photo of. Kind of disconcerting.
- frabert 6y agoYour iPhone is just suggesting you to take some cooking classes, no big deal. It's its way of helping.
- macinjosh 6y agoI mean it _was_ food.
- alliao 6y agotalk about up an ante on eating your own dog food.. BE THE DOG.
- saghm 6y agoI can't say I'm super surprised that their training data didn't include pictures of poop, as I imagine (or do I just hope?) that most people don't take many pictures of that.
- grp000 6y agoMmmm. Bowl of chocolate ice cream, tasty.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoWith the right auto-generated background music, this would have been a great dystopian 2020 summary.
- karmakaze 6y agoEither train more with bald players, or do better at choosing the 'thing that is being converged upon'. Humans would be able to follow a game regardless of the shape or color of the ball's appearance.
- Fernicia 6y agoI imagine for soccer the task of determining where the ball is based on player locations would be a lot harder than you think.
- rm445 6y ago'Spot the ball' was a staple of local newspaper competitions - an action shot of a game with the ball removed by presumably pre-digital photographic trickery. Entrants were invited to mark a cross where they thought the ball might have been, and the closest to the original centre co-ordinates won a prize. So yeah, surprisingly tricky, but you could set up a big training set along similar lines.
- sosuke 6y agoI've seen that online with big costs for guesses and prizes. Many years ago but I'm sure it is still around. I thought about how to computationally determine the ball position until I read that the ball position was decided by an impartial referee's opinion.
- revbingo 6y agoActually not the original co-ordinates, but a point arbitrarily decided by a panel. I suspect that's where most people went wrong! https://www.theguardian.com/football/shortcuts/2015/jan/14/how-to-spot-the-ball-in-spot-the-ball https://www.theguardian.com/football/shortcuts/2015/jan/14/h...
- karmakaze 6y agoIt would be difficult from player 'positions' in a single image, but the example given is obviously wrong if you consider motion of player positions over time--those player positions going back and forth with the 'ball' moving by itself along the sidelines.
- aaron695 6y agoThis tech is fucking amazing. Assuming their marketing is correct and it's actually AI they would be the only company actually using AI in production in the world AFAIK. They do Ads, Replays, Coaching, better than human ball tracking, they mention betting, not sure what. https://www.pixellot.tv/ https://www.pixellot.tv/ You put up a camera that moves with a 5G card then it's just software eating the world. As a parent you NEVER have to go to your kids game again. Which since we all love remote working that's the logical next step. We don't need humans in our lives at all. It's rare on HN you see a tech that might actually work and integrate into our lives. You could easily see it as a tool to coach your McDonalds staff. This is the future.
- dthul 6y agoIs that an auto-generated comment? I can't make sense of it at all.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoGTP3 strikes again
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 6y agoAssume the marketing for the system is true (https://www.pixellot.tv/ https://www.pixellot.tv/) It's a modular technology. Just a camera and 4/5G card. It's all then just cloud software. They already have 10,000 installations. And I don't seem why any school would not have one. Sport is worth billions. The money is there to keep this rolling. 90,000 current hours per month are produced. This is a TV station run by software.
- dthul 6y agoI think it's a neat approach for low-budget sports broadcasting but not very novel. Computer vision master students have been implementing ball tracking algorithms in first year courses since years. You usually combine some kind of feature detector (in this case probably a convolutional neural network, thus the "AI" naming) with some kind of state tracker like a Kalman filter. Getting the kinks out of the system is the hard part of course, which also pixellot seem not to have solved completely yet.
- snewman 6y agoEh, there's nothing new under the sun. The book A Robot Ping-Pong Player (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/robot-ping-pong-player https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/robot-ping-pong-player) contains an anecdote about the robot mistaking Marvin Minsky's head for a ping-pong ball... and taking a swing at him... See also: https://muq.org/~cynbe/muq/muf3_22.html https://muq.org/~cynbe/muq/muf3_22.html
- dmch-1 6y agoSome time ago I needed ball video tracking for a demo at work. I failed to find any out of the box solution which worked satisfactorily. It was way easier to find solutions for seemingly more complex tasks of people tracking or human pose estimation, for which you have numerous publically available algorithms/models.
- soylentgraham 6y agoBalls dont have many unique attributes, and move a lot faster. Sonetimes humans are easier:)
- dmch-1 6y agoYes, yet we humans do it all right.
- rossdavidh 6y agoSo, if we assume that this game is important enough to somebody to televise, why would we not have volunteers to steer the camera? This does not look like a problem that needed AI applied to it, this has the look of somebody trying to apply AI to something that NI would have worked fine on. Your basic soccer fan would have a pretty good idea of what part of the field is most interesting to be looking at right now, and would be happy to do it (for 10-15 minutes anyway) for free, and could do it remotely with a minimum of setup. You could have some season ticket holders (who can't use their tickets this year) volunteer to do it from their homes; they might even find it kind of exciting to do (for a while anyway), and you might quickly have a wait list.
- rossdavidh 6y agoA similar thing is done for nature-cams here: https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brown-bear-salmon-cam-brooks-falls https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears/brown-bear-salmon-c...
- crispyporkbites 6y agoI don’t think you could trust a volunteer football fan to control this remotely. Losing 3-0? Oops the cameras pointing at the sky for the last 30 minutes. Penalty to the opposing team? Oops I slipped and missed it. Football fans are petty and do absolutely ridiculous things. You’d have to pay them something or find some other way to incentivise them, and you’re back to square one.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoThen have a few “known good” people and then average their actions with the actions of everyone else doing it – so long as you do “virtual panning” on a cropped image to give the controllers sufficient feedback, that'll give you enough data to kick out trolls / misbehavers in a “Web of Trust” type manner, and even out most other issues that occur.
- elil17 6y agoWhile I'm sure that would work, that sounds way more complicated than using computer vision to track the ball.
- Igelau 6y agoMaybe it's just in love.
- mikeyhew 6y agoYou'd think at some point, if people were watching, they would've gotten the linesman to wear a hat or something.
- hikerclimb 6y agoGood. Hopefully mistakes like these happen with nuclear power plants, nuclear submarines, and these new nuclear reactors they plan on building.
- herpderperator 6y agoCan't they just put a tracker inside the ball for trilateration?