ForVizor: Visualizing Spatio-Temporal Team Formations in Soccer

论文
视频

作者

浙江大学CAD&CG国家重点实验室

• Yingcai Wu
• Xiao Xie
• Jiachen Wang
• Dazhen Deng
• Hongye Liang
• Wei Chen

浙江大学体育系

• Hui Zhang
• Shoubin Cheng

Introduction

Soccer is popular
Formation is vital

挑战：

• Acquire reliable fine-grained soccer data
  • Video resolution
  • Overlap of players
  • Camera angles
• Characterize the domain problems of team formation analysis
  • Problem domain (technical, terminology)
  • Thorough comprehension
• Visualize the formation changes
  • Spatio-temporal
  • Tailored spatial regions
  • Multivariate data

这项工作的主要贡献如下:

• 阵型形成分析中的领域问题的特征化和一组设计目标。
• 一种新颖的为团队阵型数据量身定制的时空设计，用于展现阵型动态和队员在阵型中的运动。
• 一种交互式视觉分析系统，可以基于对团队构成的更高视角对足球比赛进行多元分析。

Related Work

Formation Visualizations (Not clear of spatial changes)

• Line charts
• Small multiples
• Heatmap

Soccer Visualizations (Not tailored for formations)

• SoccerStories
• Bring it to the pitch
• Pressure visualization

Development Process

Propose semi-automatic tracking system (Challenge 1)
Characterize domain problems (Challenges 2)
Create novel visual design & Develop interactive system (Challenge 3)

Data Processing

Tracking

Formation Detection

Characterizing Problems

Requirements:

• 随着时间的推移，比赛情境是如何演变的？
• 阵型成对的频率是多少？两队阵型的统计差异是什么？
• 阵型的构成是如何随着时间而变化的？随着时间的推移，这两队的阵形是如何共同发展的？
• 阵型变化的影响是什么？
• 阵型变化的原因是什么？
• 一个球员在特定的阵型中表现如何？

Design Goals

• 比赛场景的叙事时间线可视化
• 阵型变化的时空表征。
• 阵型变化与多元信息的可视化联系
• 两队阵型的对比分析
• 比赛统计信息的上下文保持视图
• 足球数据的直观glyph。

G1： 比赛场景的叙事时间线可视化

G2： 阵型变化的时空表征

• disclose the spatio-temporal variation of formations
• track the temporal change of different areas and individual players

G3： 阵型变化与多元信息的可视化联系

• Detect the effect of a formation change
• Explain the reason of a formation change

G4： 两队阵型的对比分析
Identify different characteristic of two teams

G5： 比赛统计信息的上下文保持视图
Facilitate the comprehension of game statistics

G6： 足球数据的直观glyph
Cater to traditional illustrations of events and formations.

Visual Design

Formation View

Display View

Evaluation

Invite four domain experts:

• A senior coach with an Asian Football Confederation coaching certificate
• A senior data analysts in sports science
• Two PhDs in sport science who were professional players

Conduct two case studies:

Analyze two games of the Under-15 Football Championship organized by CONMEBOL.
(Data from Pixellot)

User feedback
Advantages:

• Intuitive visualizations of formation changes
• Useful interactions for coordinating views and videos
• Comprehensive functionalities for fulfilling requirements

Suggestions:

• Extend to analyze formation changes of multiple matches
• Integrate more spatial information of formation

Conclusion

Contributions:

• A problem characterization of formation analysis
• A novel spatio-temporal design for formation changes
• An interactive visual analytics system for formation analysis

Future work

• Extend Forvizor for analyzing multiple matches
• Apply formation flow to other team sports