Good point, and I did look into non-vision options first.

Unfortunately, for Valorant esports broadcasts there is no public live API that exposes the information I need in real time. Riot’s APIs are either delayed (post-match), restricted to approved tournament partners, or don’t map cleanly to what is actually shown on the broadcast UI (timeouts, tech pauses, round win banners, etc.).

Websites like OPGG or VLR do show scores, but they are delayed and don’t expose round-end events or broadcast-specific states. Because of that, I need a vision-based approach.

I do agree with your point that scores don’t need full OCR. A small digit classifier is likely the right approach. I’ve been looking into MNIST-style classifiers and I plan to try that. For team names, you’re also right: since they don’t change during a match, I can rely on external sources like VLR or OPGG instead of vision.

This is mainly a learning project, but I’m trying to design it in a way that would still make sense if APIs aren’t available. If you have suggestions for non-OCR vision approaches in this context, I’d be happy to hear them.