Cricket Australia partners with AI sports analytics start-up

Cricket Australia look to the future, forming a new partnership with Gameface — a leading global AI sports analytics start-up.

GAMEFACE.AI enables complete in-game mapping, such as identifying ball trajectory, speed and key actions including where the ball makes contact with the pitch, bat or a fielder.

This groundbreaking partnership will see Cricket Australia implement Gameface’s industry-leading machine learning technology for the 2018 – 2019 JLT One Day Cup and the upcoming National U17 Championships, ensuring the Gameface engine tracks every player, action and object in real time.

“We have been impressed with the progress and developments in the early phase of our trials with GAMEFACE.AI,” Cricket Australia, High-Performance Network Lead, Brian McFadyen said.

“We see huge capacity in applications for the Gameface platform and are excited to be leading the market in bringing new technology to the game.”

These real-time insights have the potential to be leveraged for precise, predictive recommendations (PPR) for performance in all aspects of cricket.

Unlike existing, tracking technologies such as Hawkeye, which is expensive and requires extensive infrastructure set-up, the Gameface platform can accurately track a ball’s trajectory on a single static camera feed, which makes the solution both economical and scalable to the wider cricket-playing community, including schools, clubs and elite domestic leagues and the Australian Cricket teams.

“Cricket Australia has been very supportive of our technology,” CEO GAMEFACE.AI, Shaik said.

“The live trials will provide a wealth of data and be immensely helpful and provide valuable learnings for our AI platform allowing us to sharpen our accuracy to the nth degree.”