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build-small-hackathon/
futheros-ball-rfdetr

Name: futheros-ball-rfdetr
Availability: InStock

build-small-hackathon

apache-2.0

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futheros-ball-rfdetr — personalized football ball detector

RF-DETR Nano (30M params, Apache-2.0) fine-tuned to detect the ball in amateur football footage (phone cameras, fixed venue cams, 5-a-side) — including the motion-blurred ball in flight, which COCO and broadcast-trained detectors never see.

Built for FUT-HEROS (Build Small Hackathon): upload your match clip → it finds your goals and coaches every scoring strike.

How it was trained: SAM3 as the teacher

No hand labeling. Labels come from facebook/sam3 video tracking on our own match footage, in two rounds:

Agreement labels — SAM3 track positions confirmed by an independent RF-DETR detection (≤35px): clean, easy frames.
Blur labels (v2) — SAM3-only positions on FAST-moving ball frames (speed-gated): SAM3's temporal memory holds the ball through motion blur where per-frame detectors go blind. These frames teach the model that the streak is the ball.

Plus the ball class of roboflow-jvuqo/football-players-detection-3zvbc (broadcast) for generality. RF-DETR Nano, 30 epochs, effective batch 16 — 5.7 min on one RTX 3090.

Measured results (goal detection on 3 real amateur videos, 8 true goals)

Detector	Goals	Notes
zero-shot COCO Nano	3/8	+ 1 false event
Nano fine-tuned on broadcast only	1/8	domain shift — worse than zero-shot!
this model v1 (agreement labels)	7/8	ball location finally correct
this model v2 (+ blur labels), sliced inference	8/8	all goals at the user's exact times

Sliced inference = predict on 4 overlapping half-frame tiles + full frame, merge by NMS (the Roboflow sports recipe for tiny/far balls).

Usage

python

from rfdetr import RFDETRNano
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

ckpt = hf_hub_download("build-small-hackathon/futheros-ball-rfdetr",
                       "checkpoint_best_total_v2.pth")
model = RFDETRNano(pretrain_weights=ckpt)
detections = model.predict(image, threshold=0.35)   # class 1 = ball