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

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-10201752-B2
Application number	US-201615379448-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Dec 14, 2016
Priority date	Dec 14, 2015
Publication date	Feb 12, 2019
Grant date	Feb 12, 2019

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.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. 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.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the one marker represents a first player, and the proposed modification is a substitution of a second player for the first player.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the one marker represents a ball, and the proposed modification is a relocation of the ball.

4. The method of claim 1 further comprising:
presenting an animation of the graphical depiction of the play for a window of time according to the tracked positional information, the animation including a depiction of object trajectories over the time window; and
displaying a user-selectable interface option for refinement of the time window;

wherein the proposed modification is a change in the trajectory of an object during the time window.

5. The method of claim 1 further comprising:
obtaining from the database a ranked listing of historical plays according to a calculated similarity to the queried play, the similarity based on at least one of: positional information; event information; contextual information; and
presenting a graphical depiction of one or more of the most similar historical plays on the interface.

6. The method of claim 5 further comprising:
obtaining real-world video corresponding to the presented most similar historical plays; and
playing the video via the interface.

7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the given sport is basketball and the statistical value is an expected point value for a player.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the given sport is soccer and the statistical value is an expected goal value.

9. 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.

10. The method of claim 9 , wherein discriminatively clustering the aligned plays comprises:
assigning each aligned play to one of the K clusters using the two-dimensional tracking data for the objects in the play to form a first level of the hash table/decision tree;
calculating a value of a classification metric for each play in the first-level clusters;
applying a back-propagation technique to each play in the first-level clusters to determine a subset of objects whose trajectory information contributes significantly to the value of the classification metric, and adjusting weights for the objects classification metric correspondingly; and
assigning each aligned play of a first-level cluster to a second-level sub-cluster, based on application of the re-weighted classification metric.

11. The method of claim 10 , wherein the sport is one of: basketball, soccer, rugby, American football or volleyball.

Assignees

• Stats Llc

Inventors

• Lucey Patrick
• Sha Long
• Wei Xinyu

Classifications

• G06N7/01

  Probabilistic graphical models, e.g. probabilistic networks · CPC title

• A63F13/35 Primary

  Details of game servers · CPC title

• A63F13/65

  automatically by game devices or servers from real world data, e.g. measurement in live racing competition · CPC title

• G06N3/084

  Backpropagation, e.g. using gradient descent · CPC title

• A63F13/216

  using geographical information, e.g. location of the game device or player using GPS · CPC title