AI camera thinks bald referee’s head is a soccer ball

AI is undoubtedly getting better and better. But sometimes, even though it’s artificial intelligence, it just acts plain dumb. This is what happened at a recent soccer game in Scotland. Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. equipped its stadium with a ball-tracking AI-powered camera to stream the games. However, instead of tracking the ball, the camera would often switch its focus to a referee’s bald head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zoJP2FkpgU&ab_channel=Chuckiehands

Since the coronavirus pandemic is still going strong, Caley Thistle enabled live streams of all home games. For this occasion, the club replaced human camera operators with an AI-based camera system from Pixellot. The system is programmed to track the ball along the field so the viewers always have an eye on the main action. But I guess that no one accounted for bald heads when training the algorithm. As it turned out, the algorithm thought from the referee’s head that it was a ball. Multiple times throughout the game, the camera would track the man’s head instead of the actual ball.

I personally find this very amusing. It’s amazing how far AI has come, and yet it still makes silly mistakes like this one. It also reminded me of that time when an algorithm mistook sand dunes for nudes (and not because they use the same letters for spelling). This is just proof that, no matter how intelligent AI is, it can never fully replace humans.

[via Gizmodo]