Bib Tagger

I decided to revisit an idea I had with a photographer friend, to make our own athlete bib detection system. I scoured the open public datasets, combined them all (about 12000 images), and trained my own custom model on top of YOLO11s for 4.5hrs on my eBay-acquired AMD Radeon PRO v620 (which I zip-tied a fan to since GPUs destined for data centers expect external cooling).

Results:
mAP@50: 93.44%
mAP@50-95: 64.71%

Given the application, we can use a low confidence score to allow for some false positives, promoting recall over precision. Once the bibs are found, PaddleOCR does digit guessing.

Pretty happy for less than one day of work. Claude wrote every line of code. What can be achieved with open source knowledge and powerful AI coding assistants is incredible!

I believe AI can be a force in distributing the benefits of technology to everyone, as long as we all agree to keep sharing knowledge, build strong communities, and empower people to fall in love with learning.