Why this exists
Every night, in every grappling gym, evidence disappears.
Rolls are recorded and never watched. Competition footage sits in camera rolls. Coaches remember what they can, scrub through video when they must, and lose the rest. Other sports built entire analytics infrastructures around film. Grappling — where everything that matters happens between two intertwined, occluded bodies — got skipped.
Not because it isn't worth doing. Because it's hard. Two athletes in constant contact, limbs hidden, positions defined by relationships rather than shapes — grappling is one of the hardest open problems in computer vision. Nobody has built the trustworthy foundation: the shared vocabulary, the coach-verified data, the honest benchmarks.
That is what the Martial Vision Initiative builds.
What we believe
Coaches are the intelligence.
We are not building an AI coach. A camera cannot see pressure, pain, intent, or heart — and video cannot tell you what would have happened if the athlete had chosen differently. The people who understand fighting are coaches. Our job is to turn their footage into structured, searchable evidence and to learn from their corrections. The coach stays in the loop — not as a courtesy, but because the system does not work otherwise.
Honesty over hype.
When the system is uncertain, it says so. We measure ourselves on unseen athletes, unseen sessions, unseen gyms — not cherry-picked demos. We publish what fails alongside what works. We will not claim to detect what cannot be seen.
Athletes own their footage.
Training film exposes people's weaknesses, strategies, and bodies. Every athlete consents individually. Every participant chooses how their data is used — private, anonymous research, or public contribution — and can withdraw at any time. Nothing is shared without permission. Ever.
Evidence before advice.
First, see what happened. Then, find the patterns. Only far down the road — if ever — recommend what to do. We refuse to skip steps.
Where this goes
If we succeed, coaches can open a roll when it matters and find the hard minutes fast. From that habit of honest, corrected timelines — with consent — come better models and tools over time.
We are not chasing "AI for all martial arts." We start with BJJ, uploaded rolls, six broad positions, and coaches who check our work.
That's the whole idea. Small claims, kept.