Looks that show Wimbledon’s screaming shots
New hi-tech system will watch facial expressions of players to automatically work out match highlights
EVER since John Mcenroe turned the air blue at Wimbledon in 1981, tennis has been famed for arousing the passions of players on the court. Now competitors at the All England Club can expect to have their furious facial expressions and raucous body language examined by an artificial intelligence robot.
Wimbledon’s AI machine will use visual image recognition technology to capture players’ reactions in order to instantly clip highlights for viewers to watch at the end of the game.
In its 49th year, the Championships is using “more AI than ever before” to capture the best bits in a match, including analysing the players’ body language through a live video stream and measuring the crowd noise through a microphone in the umpire’s chair.
This year, for the first time, the robot, named IBM Watson, has been taught “to understand the strike of a tennis ball on a racquet”. It can pick up everything from an agonising grimace to a celebratory cheer automatically clipping that point in the match. Each point is then ranked based on crowd excitement, player gestures and data, enabling the team of 180 people based in Wimbledon’s AI bunker to “automatically generate” the best moments for highlights in just two minutes.
“This allows us to clip the highlights package to be really tight, so it knows exactly when play is happening,” Sam Seddon, head of IBM’S AI unit at Wimbledon, told The Daily Telegraph. “We asked ourselves, how do we create video content that’s available really quickly? What are the most exciting moments in a match?
“You can sit there as a digital editor in a match and make that decision yourself, or you can turn that question over to an AI system.
“Then we had to define what exciting is – well, let’s listen to how excited the crowd are, let’s look at how animated the players are, let’s analyse the data and see whether this is a turning point in the match and use that to generate highlights.”
Provided by IBM since 2015, AI equipment at Wimbledon is installed throughout 10 courts to monitor up to 10 hours of play a day over 13 days. “That’s an awful lot of video content,” Mr Seddon said. “So we free up time for the digital editors to go and create other content.”
Last year there were 220 million views of highlights across Wimbledon’s digital platforms.
“We are continuously expanding what we are doing with AI and this is the most we have ever used at Wimbledon before,” Mr Seddon said.
The All England Lawn Tennis Club said the “excitement formula” used by its AI machine is here to stay and will be used for many years to come.