Strategy diagram for identifying play strategies in multi-view soccer video data

In this paper, we propose a strategy diagram to acquire knowledge of soccer for identifying play strategies in multi-view video data. Soccer, as the most popular team sport in the world, attracts attention of researchers in knowledge discovery and data mining and its related areas. Domain knowledge is mandatory in such applications but acquiring domain knowledge of soccer from experts is a laborious task. Moreover such domain knowledge is typically acquired and used in an ad-hoc manner. Diagrams in textbooks can be considered as a promising source of knowledge and are intuitive to humans. Our strategy diagram enables a systematic acquisition and use of such diagrams as domain knowledge for identifying play strategies in video data of a soccer game taken from multiple angles. The key idea is to transform multi-view video data to sequential coordinates then match the strategy diagram in terms of essential features. Experiments using video data of a national tournament for high school students show that the proposed method exhibits promising results and gives insightful lessons for further studies.