In this paper, we introduce SoccerNet, a benchmark for action spotting in soccer videos. The dataset is composed of 500 complete soccer games from six main European leagues, covering three seasons from 2014 to 2017 and a total duration of 764 hours. A total of 6,637 temporal annotations are automatically parsed from online match reports at a one minute resolution for three main classes of events (Goal, Yellow/Red Card, and Substitution). As such, the dataset is easily scalable. These annotations are manually refined to a one second resolution by anchoring them at a single timestamp following well-defined soccer rules. With an average of one event every 6.9 minutes, this dataset focuses on the problem of localizing very sparse events within long videos. We define the task of spotting as finding the anchors of soccer events in a video. Making use of recent developments in the realm of generic action recognition and detection in video, we provide strong baselines for detecting soccer events. We show that our best model for classifying temporal segments of length one minute reaches a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 67.8%. For the spotting task, our baseline reaches an Average-mAP of 49.7% for tolerances d ranging from 5 to 60 seconds. Our dataset and models are available at https://silviogiancola.github.io/SoccerNet.

Soccer videos are a rich playground for computer vision, involving many elements, such as players, lines, and specific objects. Hence, to capture the richness of this sport and allow for fine automated analyses, we release SoccerNet-v3, a major extension of the SoccerNet dataset, providing a wide variety of spatial annotations and cross-view correspondences. SoccerNet’s broadcast videos contain replays of important actions, allowing us to retrieve a same action from different viewpoints. We annotate those live and replay action frames showing same moments with exhaustive local information. Specifically, we label lines, goal parts, players, referees, teams, salient objects, jersey numbers, and we establish player correspondences between the views. This yields 1,324,732 annotations on 33,986 soccer images, making SoccerNet-v3 the largest dataset for multi-view soccer analysis. Derived tasks may benefit from these annotations, like camera calibration, player localization, team discrimination and multi-view re-identification, which can further sustain practical applications in augmented reality and soccer analytics. Finally, we provide Python codes to easily download our data and access our annotations.

Soccer is more than just a game - it is a passion that transcends borders and unites people worldwide. From the roar of the crowds to the excitement of the commentators, every moment of a soccer match is a thrill. Yet, with so many games happening simultaneously, fans cannot watch them all live. Notifications for main actions can help, but lack the engagement of live commentary, leaving fans feeling disconnected. To fulfill this need, we propose in this paper a novel task of dense video captioning focusing on the generation of textual commentaries anchored with single times-tamps. To support this task, we additionally present a challenging dataset consisting of almost 37k timestamped commentaries across 715.9 hours of soccer broadcast videos. Additionally, we propose a first benchmark and baseline for this task, highlighting the difficulty of temporally anchoring commentaries yet showing the capacity to generate meaningful commentaries. By providing broadcasters with a tool to summarize the content of their video with the same level of engagement as a live game, our method could help satisfy the needs of the numerous fans who follow their team but cannot necessarily watch the live game. We believe our method has the potential to enhance the accessibility and understanding of soccer content for a wider audience, bringing the excitement of the game to more people.