USA Surfing Joins the AI Wave with Azure

USA Surfing is the official national federation for the sport of surfing in the United States. The original partnership between Microsoft and USA Surfing began with a hackathon centered on using AI to improve performance and reduce injuries for athletes. The project has grown into a unique partnership between Azure AI, Cognitive Services for Vision, the Microsoft AI Developer Accelerator Program, and FTA. By simply uploading a surfing video, coaches and surfers have access to AI-generated insights on the surfer, the surfboard, the changing playing field and environment that will lead to improved performance and fewer injuries.

“Coaches look at these elements. They look at the compression of the body. They look at various dynamic factors. These machine learning models, by measuring angles between the joints of the body while performing surf maneuvers, can actually help coaches to provide feedback.”

Kevin Schulz, Aerial Phenom and Surfer, USA Surfing

Building upon surfing’s Olympic momentum

USA Surfing is the official national federation for the sport of surfing in the United States. Its mission is to promote the growth, competitive success, and multiple benefits of the surfing lifestyle in the United States and to provide the best possible experience for all participants.

USA Surfing seeks every opportunity to progress the sport and maintain dominance. Team USA’s Carissa Moore made history, winning surfing’s first Olympic Gold Medal at the sport’s 2021 Olympic debut. The U.S. is the only country going into the 2024 Olympic Games with a bonus spot for a third American woman competitor thanks to the Gold Medal earned at the 2022 ISA World Surfing Games.

A rare collaboration

The partnership between Microsoft and USA Surfing began with a hackathon. Participants focused on using artificial intelligence to improve performance and reduce injuries for athletes. A team of six full-time data scientists and engineers worked in collaboration with Azure AI. The project required a rare collaboration between Azure Cognitive Services for Vision, the Microsoft AI Developer Accelerator Program (MAIDAP), and FTA.

Using a single camera on land, the team captured surfers in motion to note strengths and weaknesses in their body position and movement patterns. From there, the team had a starting point for the project.

Advanced analytics

The team developed a solution using advanced vision action recognition, action detection, containerization, and graph-based multi-model AI/ML architecture. To use the Motion Insights framework, users upload a surfing video to a simple Web interface, then the Azure-hosted backend utilizes the new Archon platform to produce AI-generated insights and analysis.

“Coaches look at these elements. They look at the compression of the body. They look at various dynamic factors. These machine learning models, by measuring angles between the joints of the body while performing surf maneuvers, can actually help coaches to provide feedback,” — Kevin Schulz, Aerial Phenom and Surfer, USA Surfing

These insights include information on the surfer’s stance, coil, torque, wave shape and critical sections, in addition to metrics related to the shape and volume of their boards, maneuver detection, and more. The resulting analytics are stored as an overlay video file that can be used by coaches, medical and training staff, judges, and even event broadcasters.

Performance and prevention

The solution’s benefits will live up to the hackathon’s original goals: improving performance and reducing injuries. Coaches, surfers and the sports medicine teams that support them will be able to analyze, compare, and quantify key variables like speed, power, and flow for better performance, and track movements that are likely to lead to injury. Providing these data points and insights to the full team supporting surf athletes in real-time is groundbreaking.

These insights will bring more quantitative data to a traditionally subjective, artistic sport.

All the way to the Olympics

In preparation for the next summer Olympic Games, the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee will use Microsoft Azure AI and the Motion Insights framework. Microsoft and USA Surfing will continue to focus on expanding the maneuvers that the tool can capture and helping all surfers develop their skillset through technology.

Find out more about USA Surfing on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“A machine will obviously never replace the human relationships between trainers, physical therapists, coaches and athletes, but it does provide another piece of insight and information that so many other sports are using to prevent injuries.”

Ryan Simmons, Head Coach, USA Surfing