Football Object Detection and Tracking

YOLOv8 detection with ByteTrack, DeepSORT, and CSRT tracking on SportsMOT football video.

I fine-tuned YOLOv8 on the SportsMOT football split (720p, 25 fps) to detect players and the ball, then built multi-object tracking on top of the detector.

Detection

Metric Value
mAP@50 0.947
mAP@50–95 0.779
Precision / recall 0.93 / 0.94
Inference per frame 1.4 ms on a P100 GPU

Tracking

For tracking I compared ByteTrack and DeepSORT using MOTA and IDF1, and added CSRT single-object tracking with movement heat-maps. The most useful part of the project was looking closely at occlusions and ID switches, which is where most sports trackers still fail.

The code is on GitHub.