The Shape of the Game

The development of multimedia and network technologies strongly increase the interest on Internet broadcasting or streaming services, especially for soccer games. An example is the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament that registered record-breaking audiences worldwide, providing attractive alternatives to traditional TV viewing. The confluence of video streaming and computational resources opens up many possibilities for applications such as the online detection of interesting events, strategy analysis, or statistics comparisons. While much research targets algorithms to detect match statistics, strategy, retrieval, and indexing, the problem of presenting such information to users is much less studied. This paper proposes a simple but effective visual metaphor to help users browse and get insight into sports matches, with a focus on soccer games. We extract video segments, based on audio and metadata, identifying the main events of a game. Next, we use such events to define a visual representation that preserves the time-order of the video sequence, highlighting the most important events. Our visual representation enables the quick finding of the main events, allowing users to improve navigation when exploring a match, and also provides a way to evaluate the quality of a game or entire tournaments. We demonstrate our approach by applying it to several matches of 2014 World Cup, analyzing its knockout stage and comparing the final match in six different languages.