Active grid-based method for visualizing pass regions in soccer videos

This paper presents a method for visualizing pass regions that have high probabilities of the pass succeeding from broadcast soccer videos. In soccer matches, players discover pass regions based on player position geometry and player velocities. Therefore, by using player position geometry and player velocities, which are obtained from a broadcast soccer video, we can visualize pass regions. The proposed method is realized by the following two steps. 1) Generation of new three-dimensional data (volume data) for analyzing pass regions, which are not visible. 2) Visualization of pass regions. In the first step, volume data are generated from player position geometry and player velocities. By generating the volume data, which express the player position geometry and the player velocities, analysis of invisible pass regions is enabled. In the second step, by applying Active grid to the generated volume data, pass regions are visualized. Specifically, lattice points of the Active grid converge to the pass regions. Therefore, positions of the pass regions on the pitch can be visualized from densities of the lattice points. In the experiment, the proposed method is applied to actual TV programs to verify its effectiveness.