US 10,201,752 B2Granted

System for interactive sports analytics using multi-template alignment and discriminative clustering

AssigneeStats LLC

InventorsPatrick Lucey, Long Sha, Xinyu Wei

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Abstract

A system is described for interactively analyzing plays of a sporting event based on real-world positional tracking data. Using positional information regarding the players and/or ball and/or other objects obtained from a tracking system, along with identified event data and contextual information, the system processes a library of plays (e.g., one or more seasons' worth of a league's contests) into a searchable database of plays using multiple alignment templates and discriminative clustering techniques. A user interface is described for interacting with the database in a graphical manner, whereby users can query a graphical depiction of a play and receive the most similar plays from the library, along with statistical information relating to the plays. The user interface further permits the user to modify the query graphically (e.g., moving or exchanging players, ball trajectories, etc.) and obtain updated statistical information for comparison.

Claims11

Dependent claims

A computer-implemented method for interacting with a user via a graphical computer interface to interactively analyze a play of a sports game, the sports game having been tracked with a tracking system to record two-dimensional positional information for objects on the playing surface and event data having been determined for the game and associated with the two-dimensional positional information, and the play having been retrieved from a database of historical plays and event information and loaded onto the interface, the method comprising:

displaying a graphical depiction of the play on the interface, the graphical depiction representing the play retrieved from the database and including a representation of the playing surface and including markers representing positions of tracked objects at a given point in time;
presenting a statistical value for an aspect of the play at the given point in time, the statistical value generated from the database of historical plays and event information;
receiving a proposed modification to the graphical depiction of the play in the interface, via user interaction with at least one marker;
querying the database with the proposed modified play;
obtaining from the database a statistical value for the aspect of the proposed modified play, the updated statistical value being generated based on the historical plays and the game event information in the database;
and
updating the presented statistical value with the obtained value for the aspect of the proposed modified play.

4 more elements

A method for indexing a database of plays for a sport, each play including two-dimensional positional tracking data for the objects on a playing surface and a time interval, the method comprising:

selecting a first play for use as a first template;
determining a set of plays for use as additional templates;
aligning the plays in the database to each of the templates, representing each aligned play in the database with a permutation matrix for the play;
and
discriminatively clustering the aligned plays in a top-down hierarchical manner to form a hash table/decision tree;
wherein determining the additional templates comprises:
calculating a cost matrix for each play in the database with respect to the first template, the cost matrix representing a quantitative difference between the trajectories of each tracked object in the play and each object in the template;
determining a permutation matrix for the play with respect to the first template;
choosing a value K>1;
clustering the plays in the database to assign them into K clusters around K candidate plays;
calculating the total reconstruction error for the K clusters, and using the K candidate plays as the additional templates if the total reconstruction error is less than a desired threshold value.

8 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Facts

Application: 15/379,448Filed 14 Dec 2016 · us provisional application
Priority: 14 Dec 2015
Published: US 2017/0165570 A115 Jun 2017
Granted: 12 Feb 2019
Term ends: Not estimatedThe source records don’t support an estimate.

Classification12 codes

A63F 13/35
Interconnection arrangements between game servers and game devices; Interconnection arrangements between game devices; Interconnection…: details…
A63F 13/216
Characterised by their sensors, purposes or types: using geographical information, e.g. location of the game device or player using GPS
A63F 13/25
Video games, i.e. games using an electronically generated display having two or more dimensions: output arrangements for video game devices
A63F 13/812
Special adaptations for executing a specific game genre or game mode: ball games, e.g. soccer or baseball