Team behaviour analysis in sports using the poisson equation

Abstract

We propose a novel physics-based model for analysing team play- ers’ positions and movements on a sports playing field. The goal is to detect for each frame the region with the highest population of a given team’s players and the region towards which the team is moving as they press for territorial advancement, termed the region of intent. Given the positions of team players from a plan view of the playing field at any given time, we solve a particular Poisson equation to generate a smooth distribution. The proposed distribu- tion provides the likelihood of a point to be occupied by players so that more highly populated regions can be detected by appropriate thresholding. Computing the proposed distribution for each frame provides a sequence of distributions, which we process to detect the region of intent at any time during the game. Our model is evalu- ated on a field hockey dataset, and results show that the proposed approach can provide effective features that could be used to gener- ate team statistics useful for performance evaluation or broadcasting purposes