Football player identification based on YOLOv5 backbone and SPD-Conv

With the rapid development of computer technology and Internet technology, the information age has come. The combination of computer technology and sports is one of the most popular research fields. This paper mainly completes the construction of football player number dataset and identification of football players through the jersey number. Firstly, the dataset is constructed based on player detection and number region detection. Then in the player identification task, we uses part of the backbone network of YOLOv5 model as the feature extraction module of the player identification network. Moreover, SPD-Conv module is added to improve the network recognition performance under the condition of small size target and low resolution. A series of experiments were also done to verify the performance of our proposed model. Finally, the recognition accuracy of our proposed model reached 92.75%.