AUTOMATIC BIB RECOGNITION. KICK OFF AT MARCIALONGA 2018

After 18-months strenuous work of research and development, Deep Vision Consulting is extremely proud to announce the release of the automatic bib recognition system for sport events that just run over all official pictures of Marcialonga 2018, the great cross country skiing event on Italian Dolomites which took place on January 28th. But let’s put things in order…

To offer the pictures for sales to sportsmen, professional photographers of sport events struggle with the tedious, costly and long-lasting task of annotating every bib over all their photos of an event. Among these photographers, there are our friends at FotoStudio3, Andalo, Italy. They took contact with us in 2016 asking to ease their life of photographers, leaving to them the fun of the click over the photo camera, and saving them from the bother of the other click, the keyboard one… hours and hours spent in front of a PCs just ticking numbers on the keyboard.

In order to automate this process, some systems use barcodes or other variants like QR or Aruco… well, yeah, cool but not fun for us at Deep Vision Consulting. And not fun for the organizers too, that need to waste extra space on the bib for those extra codes… I mean, numbers are there already!

To make the long story short, Deep Vision Consulting ended up with a complete suite of end-to-end bib recognition which got proudly tested over official pictures of Marcialonga 2018. These are the numbers: total of 100.000 photos, i.e. 300GB of data, processed by our system in less than 8 hours, and not even one extra bit of hardware installed on FotoStudio3 servers. Look at this from the photographer perspective: the event finished on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning 8am all bib recognitions were ready at hand. Amazing isn't it? And look at these nice pictures in this page with the results produced by our system. Courtesy of FotoStudio3, special thanks to Sergio and Sara Mirri.

If you are a professional photographer of sport events and you wish to know more, take contact with us and we will be glad to provide you details.
Our work is not finished, actually it just started. Our next step? People identification, to associate the correct bib number even on the pictures where the bib is not readable; stay tuned!

JUNE 2018 UPDATE: we just published the Tagily system, check it out!