Billiards Sports Analytics: Datasets and Tasks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new billiards sports dataset with ball layouts, trajectories, and statistics, and develops techniques for prediction, generation, and retrieval tasks to aid players, coaches, and fans.

Contribution

It provides the first publicly available billiards dataset and proposes novel methods for analysis tasks specific to billiards sports.

Findings

Methods perform effectively on dataset

Techniques enable prediction and generation of layouts

Retrieval system aids in identifying similar billiards configurations

Abstract

Nowadays, it becomes a common practice to capture some data of sports games with devices such as GPS sensors and cameras and then use the data to perform various analyses on sports games, including tactics discovery, similar game retrieval, performance study, etc. While this practice has been conducted to many sports such as basketball and soccer, it remains largely unexplored on the billiards sports, which is mainly due to the lack of publicly available datasets. Motivated by this, we collect a dataset of billiards sports, which includes the layouts (i.e., locations) of billiards balls after performing break shots, called break shot layouts, the traces of the balls as a result of strikes (in the form of trajectories), and detailed statistics and performance indicators. We then study and develop techniques for three tasks on the collected dataset, including (1) prediction and (2) generation on the layouts data, and (3) similar billiards layout retrieval on the layouts data, which can serve different users such as coaches, players and fans. We conduct extensive experiments on the collected dataset and the results show that our methods perform effectively and efficiently.