If you ask a camera operator to track a soccer ball on the field, they probably wouldn’t have much difficulty in doing so, or at least they would have no issues differentiating between a soccer ball and a human head. However, when it comes to AI, it might be a different story, like in the case of a soccer game held in Scotland.
During the match, an AI tracking camera was used to help track the movement of the soccer ball during the game. However, it seems that the AI was unable to distinguish between the ball on the field and the referee’s bald head. For several moments during the game, the camera actually panned away from the actual game and started to track the referee instead.
The hilarious results led to the commentator apologizing on the camera’s behalf for distracting from the game. We suppose to be fair, AI is still in the relatively early stages of development, so some mixups like this can happen from time to time. However, we imagine that over time, AI will eventually become smarter at being able to tell things apart as well as humans can, but for now, hopefully mistakes like this will be fixed and we won’t see any mixups like this happen again in the future.
In the meantime, you can check out the clip above where you’ll see the camera pan away from what is a very obvious portion of the action in the game to the referee’s head.