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Performance analysis in soccer: a Cartesian coordinates based approach using RoboCup data

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Abstract

In soccer, like in business, results are often the best indicator of a team’s performance in a certain competition but insufficient to a coach to asses his team performance. As a consequence, measurement tools play an important role in this particular field. In this research work, a performance tool for soccer, based only in Cartesian coordinates is presented. Capable of calculating final game statistics, suisber of shots, the calculus methodology analyzes the game in a sequential manner, starting with the identification of the kick event (the basis for detecting all events), which is related with a positive variation in the ball’s velocity vector. The achieved results were quite satisfactory, mainly due to the number of successfully detected events in the validation process (based on manual annotation). For the majority of the statistics, these values are above 92% and only in the case of shots do these values drop to numbers between 74 and 85%. In the future, this methodology could be improved, especially regarding the shot statistics, integrated with a real-time localization system, or expanded for other collective sports games, such as hockey or basketball.

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Notes

  1. More information available online at http://www.robocup.org/.

  2. Ranwez, S. Ranwez Soccer Ontology. DAML Ontologies Library Web site, submitted in 2002, available online at http://www.daml.org/ontologies/273.

  3. Moller, K. SWAN Soccer Ontology, submitted in 2004, available online at http://sw.deri.org/~knud/swan/ontologies/soccer.

  4. More information available online at http://gate.ac.uk/.

  5. More information available online at http://ne.cs.uec.ac.jp/~koji/SoccerScope2/index.htm.

  6. More information available online at http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/sserver/index.php?title=Download.

  7. More information available online at http://jruby.codehaus.org/language.

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Acknowledgements

The first and third authors are supported by FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia under grant SFRH/BD/44663/2008 and SFRH/BD/36610/2007, respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Department of Informatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering of Porto University, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n, 4200-465, Porto, Portugal

    Pedro Henriques Abreu, José Moura, Daniel Castro Silva & Luís Paulo Reis

  2. Investigation Center of Investigation, Education, Innovation and Intervention in Sport, Faculty of Sport of Porto University, Rua Dr. Plácido Costa, 91, 4200-450, Porto, Portugal

    Júlio Garganta

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  1. Pedro Henriques Abreu
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  2. José Moura
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  3. Daniel Castro Silva
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  4. Luís Paulo Reis
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  5. Júlio Garganta
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Correspondence to Pedro Henriques Abreu.

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Abreu, P.H., Moura, J., Silva, D.C. et al. Performance analysis in soccer: a Cartesian coordinates based approach using RoboCup data. Soft Comput 16, 47–61 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-011-0733-0

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