11,825 research outputs found
PlayeRank: data-driven performance evaluation and player ranking in soccer via a machine learning approach
The problem of evaluating the performance of soccer players is attracting the
interest of many companies and the scientific community, thanks to the
availability of massive data capturing all the events generated during a match
(e.g., tackles, passes, shots, etc.). Unfortunately, there is no consolidated
and widely accepted metric for measuring performance quality in all of its
facets. In this paper, we design and implement PlayeRank, a data-driven
framework that offers a principled multi-dimensional and role-aware evaluation
of the performance of soccer players. We build our framework by deploying a
massive dataset of soccer-logs and consisting of millions of match events
pertaining to four seasons of 18 prominent soccer competitions. By comparing
PlayeRank to known algorithms for performance evaluation in soccer, and by
exploiting a dataset of players' evaluations made by professional soccer
scouts, we show that PlayeRank significantly outperforms the competitors. We
also explore the ratings produced by {\sf PlayeRank} and discover interesting
patterns about the nature of excellent performances and what distinguishes the
top players from the others. At the end, we explore some applications of
PlayeRank -- i.e. searching players and player versatility --- showing its
flexibility and efficiency, which makes it worth to be used in the design of a
scalable platform for soccer analytics
Unsupervised Object Discovery and Tracking in Video Collections
This paper addresses the problem of automatically localizing dominant objects
as spatio-temporal tubes in a noisy collection of videos with minimal or even
no supervision. We formulate the problem as a combination of two complementary
processes: discovery and tracking. The first one establishes correspondences
between prominent regions across videos, and the second one associates
successive similar object regions within the same video. Interestingly, our
algorithm also discovers the implicit topology of frames associated with
instances of the same object class across different videos, a role normally
left to supervisory information in the form of class labels in conventional
image and video understanding methods. Indeed, as demonstrated by our
experiments, our method can handle video collections featuring multiple object
classes, and substantially outperforms the state of the art in colocalization,
even though it tackles a broader problem with much less supervision
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