Abstract
The Video Assistant Referee (VAR) has revolutionized association football, enabling referees to review incidents on the pitch, make informed decisions, and ensure fairness. However, due to the lack of referees in many countries and the high cost of the VAR infrastructure, only professional leagues can benefit from it. In this paper, we propose a Video Assistant Referee System (VARS) that can automate soccer decision-making. VARS leverages the latest findings in multi-view video analysis, to provide real-time feedback to the referee, and help them make informed decisions that can impact the outcome of a game. To validate VARS, we introduce SoccerNet-MVFoul, a novel video dataset of soccer fouls from multiple camera views, annotated with extensive foul descriptions by a professional soccer referee, and we benchmark our VARS to automatically recognize the characteristics of these fouls. We believe that VARS has the potential to revolutionize soccer refereeing and take the game to new heights of fairness and accuracy across all levels of professional and amateur federations.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW) |
Publisher | IEEE |
Pages | 5086-5097 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Print) | 9798350302493 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 14 2023 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2023-09-26Acknowledgements: This work was partly supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research through the Visual Computing Center (VCC) funding and the SDAIA-KAUST Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (SDAIA-KAUST AI). A. Cioppa is funded by the F.R.S.-FNRS.