In amateur leagues also the games tend to be very competitive. And if the league generally provides two referees for each match, vocations tend to be rare.
Amateur football, and in particular youth football, is experiencing a significant shortage of referees. This is partly due to the pandemic and partly to the horrible treatment referees tend to receive from grumpy, over-agitated parents or players.
The position is usually poorly paid, and many former umpires are simply fed up with it. Without some referee presence, competitive football, which requires decisions best left to a neutral referee, is virtually impossible.
A last resort solution
CoCoPIE, a software startup, thinks it has the technology to provide a solution of last resort. CoCoPIE recently announced a partnership with Cognizant to develop a set of super-resolution solutions to enhance end-users’ multimedia viewing experience by creating high-resolution images and videos.
Under this new partnership, Cognizant and CoCoPIE will work in tandem to achieve real-time processing by creating advanced solutions based on deep neural networks (DNNs), giving this technology, which can be used on devices general public, an interesting reach in the real world.
One of the possible applications of CoCoPIE’s AI is to address the current shortage of amateur soccer referees. While the app might not be the best way to determine if a sliding tackle is fair play, it could be a great way to signal offsides via smartphone. This could help provide a crucial extra pair of eyes, allowing a single human referee to focus on harder-to-automate fouls.
An AI referee?
Thanks to the AI-referee, matches for which there are few human referees could continue even in the event of limited cloud connectivity and the rules could be applied to several matches simultaneously.
“This partnership with CoCoPIE will allow us to further enhance our customers’ experience on mobile and peripheral devices,” said James Rowley, associate director of communications, media and technology at Cognizant Worldwide. “We look forward to leveraging CoCoPIE’s advanced AI software technology to provide real-time video stream processing while maintaining high accuracy, which will ultimately enable our customers to benefit from noticeable performance and higher resolution images and videos.”
The bottom line here is that CoCoPIE’s technology gives smartphones live, real-time AI capabilities that were previously only possible on dedicated AI servers or accelerators. “Thanks to CoCoPIE’s proprietary technology on codesign compression-compilation, AI model optimization and automatic compiler-level code generation are optimized hand in hand,” explains the startup’s management.
Source: ZDNet.com