Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis in Football with SportSense

Abstract

The task of performance analysts and coaches in football (and other team sports) is manifold: they need to assess the performance of individual players of their team, they need to monitor the interaction between players of their team and their tactical compliance, and they need to analyze other teams. For this, they usually have to consider various sources of information: video footage, tracking data, event data, and aggregated statistics. On the basis of this information, analysts have to generate quantitative summaries of events including their spatial and temporal distribution, and the qualitative assessment of individual events by considering the associated video footage. In this paper, we present SportSense, a system for sports video retrieval, that seamlessly combines quantitative and qualitative analysis. For this, SportSense provides dedicated filters that help analysts in selecting the events they are interested in. Moreover, it supports the comparative analysis of stored queries with respect to specific parameters. Essentially, SportSense allows to easily switch between qualitative and quantitative analyses to support coaches and analysts in a best possible way in their task. Based on a user study, we show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.