Investigating the Sketchplan: A Novel Way of Identifying Tactical Behavior in Massive Soccer Datasets.

Coaches and analysts prepare for upcoming matches by identifying common patterns in the positioning and movement of the competing teams in specific situations. Existing approaches in this domain typically rely on manual video analysis and formation discussion using whiteboards; or expert systems that rely on state-of-the-art video and trajectory visualization techniques and advanced user interaction. We bridge the gap between these approaches by contributing a light-weight, simplified interaction and visualization system, which we conceptualized in an iterative design study with the coaching team of a European first league soccer team. Our approach is walk-up usable by all domain stakeholders, and at the same time, can leverage advanced data retrieval and analysis techniques: a virtual magnetic tactic-board. Users place and move digital magnets on a virtual tactic-board, and these interactions get translated to spatio-temporal queries, used to retrieve relevant situations from massive team movement data. Despite such seemingly imprecise query input, our approach is highly usable, supports quick user exploration, and retrieval of relevant results via query relaxation. Appropriate simplified result visualization supports in-depth analyses to explore team behavior, such as formation detection, movement analysis, and what-if analysis. We evaluated our approach with several experts from European first league soccer clubs. The results show that our approach makes the complex analytical processes needed for the identification of tactical behavior directly accessible to domain experts for the first time, demonstrating our support of coaches in preparation for future encounters.

Where to go: Computational and visual what-if analyses in soccer.

To prepare their teams for upcoming matches, analysts in professional soccer watch and manually annotate up to three matches a day. When annotating matches, domain experts try to identify and improve suboptimal movements based on intuition and professional experience. The high amount of matches needing to be analysed manually result in a tedious and time-consuming process, and results may be subjective. We propose an automatic approach for the realisation of effective region-based what-if analyses in soccer. Our system covers the automatic detection of region-based faulty movement behaviour, as well as the automatic suggestion of possible improved alternative movements. As we show, our approach effectively supports analysts and coaches investigating matches by speeding up previously time-consuming work. We enable domain experts to include their domain knowledge in the analysis process by allowing to interactively adjust suggested improved movement, as well as its implications on region control. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed approach via an expert study with three invited domain experts, one being head coach from the first Austrian soccer league. As our results show that experts most often agree with the suggested player movement (83%), our proposed approach enhances the analytical capabilities in soccer and supports a more efficient analysis.

Bring It to the Pitch: Combining Video and Movement Data to Enhance Team Sport Analysis.

Analysts in professional team sport regularly perform analysis to gain strategic and tactical insights into player and team behavior. Goals of team sport analysis regularly include identification of weaknesses of opposing teams, or assessing performance and improvement potential of a coached team. Current analysis workflows are typically based on the analysis of team videos. Also, analysts can rely on techniques from Information Visualization, to depict e.g., player or ball trajectories. However, video analysis is typically a time-consuming process, where the analyst needs to memorize and annotate scenes. In contrast, visualization typically relies on an abstract data model, often using abstract visual mappings, and is not directly linked to the observed movement context anymore. We propose a visual analytics system that tightly integrates team sport video recordings with abstract visualization of underlying trajectory data. We apply appropriate computer vision techniques to extract trajectory data from video input. Furthermore, we apply advanced trajectory and movement analysis techniques to derive relevant team sport analytic measures for region, event and player analysis in the case of soccer analysis. Our system seamlessly integrates video and visualization modalities, enabling analysts to draw on the advantages of both analysis forms. Several expert studies conducted with team sport analysts indicate the effectiveness of our integrated approach.

Director's Cut: Analysis and Annotation of Soccer Matches.

For development and alignment of tactics and strategies, professional soccer analysts spend up to three working days manually analyzing and annotating professional soccer matches. In an effort to improve soccer player and match analysis, a visual-interactive and data-analysis support system focuses on key situations by using rule-based filtering and automatically annotating key types of soccer match elements. The authors evaluate the proposed approach by analyzing real-world soccer matches and several expert studies. Quantitative measures show the proposed methods can significantly outperform naive solutions.

SimpliFly: A Methodology for Simplification and Thematic Enhancement of Trajectories.

Movement data sets collected using today's advanced tracking devices consist of complex trajectories in terms of length, shape, and number of recorded positions. Multiple additional attributes characterizing the movement and its environment are often also included making the level of complexity even higher. Simplification of trajectories can improve the visibility of relevant information by reducing less relevant details while maintaining important movement patterns. We propose a systematic stepwise methodology for simplifying and thematically enhancing trajectories in order to support their visual analysis. The methodology is applied iteratively and is composed of: (a) a simplification step applied to reduce the morphological complexity of the trajectories, (b) a thematic enhancement step which aims at accentuating patterns of movement, and (c) the representation and interactive exploration of the results in order to make interpretations of the findings and further refinement to the simplification and enhancement process. We illustrate our methodology through an analysis example of two different types of tracks, aircraft and pedestrian movement.

Spatiotemporal analysis of sensor logs using growth ring maps.

Spatiotemporal analysis of sensor logs is a challenging research field due to three facts: a) traditional two-dimensional maps do not support multiple events to occur at the same spatial location, b) three-dimensional solutions introduce ambiguity and are hard to navigate, and c) map distortions to solve the overlap problem are unfamiliar to most users. This paper introduces a novel approach to represent spatial data changing over time by plotting a number of non-overlapping pixels, close to the sensor positions in a map. Thereby, we encode the amount of time that a subject spent at a particular sensor to the number of plotted pixels. Color is used in a twofold manner; while distinct colors distinguish between sensor nodes in different regions, the colors' intensity is used as an indicator to the temporal property of the subjects' activity. The resulting visualization technique, called Growth Ring Maps, enables users to find similarities and extract patterns of interest in spatiotemporal data by using humans' perceptual abilities. We demonstrate the newly introduced technique on a dataset that shows the behavior of healthy and Alzheimer transgenic, male and female mice. We motivate the new technique by showing that the temporal analysis based on hierarchical clustering and the spatial analysis based on transition matrices only reveal limited results. Results and findings are cross-validated using multidimensional scaling. While the focus of this paper is to apply our visualization for monitoring animal behavior, the technique is also applicable for analyzing data, such as packet tracing, geographic monitoring of sales development, or mobile phone capacity planning.