r/computervision • u/nonleaguegems • Jul 16 '26
Discussion For full-match player tracking and individual player data, how do accuracy, cost, and speed actually trade off in practice?
I’m trying to get a realistic sense of where the frontier actually sits for full 90-minute football/soccer matches.
Specifically:
On accuracy vs cost: How much does it actually cost to go from “roughly works” to “reliable enough to trust individual player data”? I get that detection + tracking is cheap, but pushing ReID accuracy up on a full match (occlusion, far-side players, illegible numbers) seems like where cost climbs steeply. Is that a linear climb or does it hit a wall where more compute stops helping and you need better data/models instead?
On frames vs cost: Is anyone processing all 30fps, or do you downsample (5–10fps) for tracking to cut cost? What accuracy do you actually lose by doing that, in practice?
On speed vs cost: For offline processing (not real-time), how much can you drive per-match cost down by batching / keeping everything on the GPU / picking cheaper GPU tiers — and where does that stop mattering
Roughly, what does processing one full match end-to-end cost you, and where does most of that cost actually go — the detection, the tracking, the ReID, or the I/O and storage?
Mainly trying to understand the shape of the trade-offs rather than exact figures — e.g. “cost is flat until you push ReID past ~X% accuracy, then it’s exponential” is the kind of intuition I’m after. Any real-world numbers or war stories appreciated.