Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Team Sports -- A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent methods analyzing spatio-temporal player data in team invasion sports, highlighting advances in tracking technology, research categorization, and open questions for future exploration.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive categorization of recent research efforts using spatio-temporal data in team sports and identifies open challenges in the field.

Findings

High-definition tracking enables detailed analysis of player movements.

Research is categorized into a coherent framework.

Open research questions are identified for future work.

Abstract

Team-based invasion sports such as football, basketball and hockey are similar in the sense that the players are able to move freely around the playing area; and that player and team performance cannot be fully analysed without considering the movements and interactions of all players as a group. State of the art object tracking systems now produce spatio-temporal traces of player trajectories with high definition and high frequency, and this, in turn, has facilitated a variety of research efforts, across many disciplines, to extract insight from the trajectories. We survey recent research efforts that use spatio-temporal data from team sports as input, and involve non-trivial computation. This article categorises the research efforts in a coherent framework and identifies a number of open research questions.