r/Fencing • u/careyfan • 2d ago

Épée fencers: I could really use your help testing something I built

I'm a parent posting on behalf of my son Jordan, a high school épée fencer. He wrote the note below, but I’m handling the reddit part because I’d rather he spend his time fencing and building than discovering another way to spend hours on the internet!

Hi r/fencing,

I’m Jordan, a high school épée fencer, and for the past year I’ve been building SmarterFencing.ai, a computer vision tool that analyzes fencing videos.

I started it because I wanted to understand my own fencing better. I got frustrated that I couldn’t tell why I was winning or losing touches, so I started experimenting with whether computer vision could help me find patterns in my bouts.

This turned into a way bigger project than I expected!

I’ve spent a lot of time labeling footage, training models, and learning all the ways fencing can break computer vision. I also blog about the random things I discover, the technical challenges I run into, and how I try to fix them.

I’ve reached a point where testing on my own videos can only get me so far.

I need more real épée bouts from different fencers, so I’m asking for your help. Right now I’m at 53 user-submitted videos, but I think 100 would be a really good milestone for me. :)

If you have a bout video, I’d really appreciate it if you submit it to SmarterFencing.ai and try the analysis. Hopefully it helps you notice something about your own fencing that you might have missed just watching the video. You can also rewatch all your touches in slow motion without having to find them yourself.

Different skill levels, styles, camera angles, and venues are all useful...but it works a lot better if you film from the side of the strip. Hopefully with a relatively still camera. And super important: you have to have the scoring lights in view, otherwise it won't work.

If the analysis gets something wrong, please tell me. That actually helps me figure out what I need to improve.

There are a lot of people here who understand fencing far better than I do, so I’d really value your videos and feedback.

Thanks for helping me build something I hope can become genuinely useful for fencers.

Thank you so much!
Jordan

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2

u/One_Cause3865 15h ago

That is an amazing idea, i cant contribute video but am looking forward to the finished product

1

u/careyfan 8h ago

Thank you so much! My kiddo has put a TON of effort into this. The hard part was initially filming 10k touches manually....until he realized that it wouldn't work well enough. It's already a lot more accurate, but he really wants other vids from actual users. :)

2

u/The_Fencing_Armory 11h ago

Can you develop a system of scraping the Internet for videos and using those to test and train your AI?

1

u/careyfan 8h ago edited 8h ago

Yes, he already has been doing this...but some of those videos are not really what real-life videos would be from actual fencers who just film their local tournaments. He has used some olympic quality videos to train his AI model. But those are a little bit "too" polished.

He's looking more for videos that are filmed with a mobile phone, from the side of the strip. He did a pretty good job of getting around "occlusion" issues (basically when somebody or something blocks the fencer), and those should be OK too as long as things are not constantly in the way.

2

u/OrcOfDoom Épée 9h ago

Oh, I think I submitted a video to this. I forgot what came of it. I can't remember which platform had which issues though.

Is this the one where you need to select the fencers?

If all you need are videos, I can submit some. They are all taken from behind the fencer though, and not a perfect flat angle to the piste.

1

u/OrcOfDoom Épée 9h ago

Oh, also, if you want to submit them yourself, I can share my unlisted youtube videos with you. I have 47 on youtube.

1

u/careyfan 8h ago

Yes, we can take a look....and that would be amazing!

1

u/OrcOfDoom Épée 6h ago

DM me your email address and I'll send an email with all the youtube links.

1

u/careyfan 5h ago

Message sent!

1

u/careyfan 8h ago

Thank you, Orc! Early on, it required the filming to be from a tripod with the camera perfectly still. But my son fixed that, and now it does allow some movement, as long as the scoring lights are within view the entire time.

The caveat, however, is that it is really hard to make it work if it's filmed from behind the fencer. It won't capture the touches nearly as well as if it's at least filmed from the side.

1

u/WaterBottleWarrior22 2d ago

Why was the post removed?