Automated tracking of football matches

04 / 12 / 2015 | Michaela Nesvarova

There is a lot of money and interest in football. It is therefore highly important for football teams to pick the most suitable players. Now they have to do that based on a pure observation, but researchers from the UT and SciSports are working on developing a fully automated software for tracking football players and the ball. So far their efforts are paying off.

'The end goal is to do tracking in real time and to enable an automatic evaluation of players. You will be able to precisely tell what are their strengths and weaknesses, in which position they should play and so on,' explains Tauseef Ali, a postdoctoral researcher and the main coordinator of project BallJames, which aims to provide the best available tracking of soccer matches.

New tracking algorithm

BallJames is a project funded by SciSports, a UT based company with the motto 'science serving football'. Most recently, the project has successfully reached the end of its first phase, during which the researchers managed to track players and the ball on a small playing field.

Read more about BallJames in the December issue of UT Nieuws Magazine.

Verschillende Twentse jongerenorganisaties boden onderwijsminister Eppo Bruins woensdag een brief aan, waarin zij vragen om een uitzonderingspositie voor de regio Twente als het gaat om bezuinigings- en internationaliseringsbeleid in het hoger onderwijs. ‘Blijf investeren in onze onderwijswaaier om als groeimotor voor de regio te fungeren.’