I've been asked to shot a race with 6 to 700 participants.
To make their life easier when they are looking for their pictures, I'd like to allow them to search for their pictures based on their BIB numbers (nothing new).
So this means that I need a way to recognize the bib numbers and add that information to an IPTC field or the file name.
I'd like to avoid doing it by hand and was wondering if there was some software that can do bib number recognition ?
Get a numeric keypad and use code replacement in photomechanic. You'll be able to run through the entire 700 people inputting the numbers in one caption field and running code-replacement to caption the images in about an hour. That's how pretty much all the road-running and track and field is done at www.mundosportimages.com. We've done a couple of races of similar size, and a few track meets that are much bigger with this system.
Pshizzy, thanks for the idea. Didn't know that you could use face recognition on something else than faces. I'll have a look
cocodrillo, thanks for the feedback. I was thinking it would take more time to input the numbers.
rrtht20, thanks for the link I'll have a look.
i have continued to search, what I found on some other forums is that software for bib number recognition exists, but the companies that use them do not sell / share them (home made developpment ?).
Looks like some companies are also sending their images to low salary countries for manual tagging.
Hi Frederic!
if you're still interested we have just released tagily.io, a cloud-based service for automatic bib number recognition in sport events.
It's super easy to use and you'll have the results in a few minutes after you start uploading the pictures. We also provide a convenient upload tool. Depending on your internet connection speed, we can process up to 10.000 images per hour.
As the results come back, you can choose to refine them with our annotation tool (free to use) or make them available as they are. You can use it on all types of bibs, no additional code placement is required (e.g. QR or Aruco code), because we read the number directly. We don't even have camera requirements: as long as the bib number is good enough for a human to read it, our artificial intelligence system can also read it.
We usually agree with our customers a cost per picture that depends heavily on the amount of pictures they take and process through our system.
Why don't you send us a a few images to test at [email protected] and let us know approx. how many pictures you take yearly - we'll get back to you with the recognition results and a cost per image.
I tried the demo on your website with 10 or 11 running and / or biking images. It was able to recognize the number in 3 images, sometimes with errors. Better than nothing but not great.
Unfortunately, we couldn't process the motorbike and american football pictures you uploaded; these sports are not supported yet. Out of the remaining images, a few of them had complexities (i.e. distractors and low resolution) that we are aware of and that we are already working to solve.
We are very committed to our goal of automatically tagging sport bibs while still providing human-level accuracy. We have partnered with a big sport photography studio who is already using Tagily and together we are improving it week by week!
Tagily will be officially released later this year and the recognition is going to be far superior than today's demo.
But don't trust my words, come back to our demo at https://tagily.io and check it out for yourself!
