Abstract
Knowledge of spatial movement patterns in soccer occurring on a regular basis can give a soccer coach, analyst or reporter insights in the playing style or tactics of a group of players or team. Furthermore, it can support a coach to better prepare for a soccer match by analysing (trained) movement patterns of both his own as well as opponent players. We explore the use of the Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC), a spatiotemporal qualitative calculus describing the relative movement between objects, for spatial movement pattern recognition of players movements in soccer. The proposed method allows for the recognition of spatial movement patterns that occur on different parts of the field and/or at different spatial scales. Furthermore, the Levenshtein distance metric supports the recognition of similar movements that occur at different speeds and enables the comparison of movements that have different temporal lengths. We first present the basics of the calculus, and subsequently illustrate its applicability with a real soccer case. To that end, we present a situation where a user chooses the movements of two players during 20 seconds of a real soccer match of a 2016–2017 professional soccer competition as a reference fragment. Following a pattern matching procedure, we describe all other fragments with QTC and calculate their distance with the QTC representation of the reference fragment. The top-k most similar fragments of the same match are presented and validated by means of a duo-trio test. The analyses show the potential of QTC for spatial movement pattern recognition in soccer.
Highlights
In soccer and coaching sciences, the analysis of movement patterns of players has primarily focused on the impact of factors such as field size, number of players [1] on the field and even weather conditions or coach encouragement on the performed movement patterns [2,3]
We investigate the use of the Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC) [27] for the recognition of spatial movement patterns of one or multiple players
The method we present in this paper is based on the Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC) [52] a calculus that, just as Relative Movement (REMO), originated in the field of Geography and was already used for team formation analysis in soccer [53]
Summary
In soccer and coaching sciences, the analysis of movement patterns of players has primarily focused on the impact of factors such as field size, number of players [1] on the field and even weather conditions or coach encouragement on the performed movement patterns [2,3]. At a more personal level, the mental impact of the performed movement patterns was studied intensively [4]. Methods have been introduced that combine spatial and contextual information to study performance in soccer [5]. Interesting, these studies fail to detect actual performed spatial movement patterns of players, which are useful for a coach to describe the playing style or tactics of a group of players or of a team.
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