VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Views

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.

arXiv commentAccepted at CVSports'23

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• X-VARS: Introducing Explainability in Football Refereeing with Multi-Modal Large Language Model
• SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Results
• A Universal Protocol to Benchmark Camera Calibration for Sports
• Multi-task Learning for Joint Re-identification, Team Affiliation, and Role Classification for Sports Visual Tracking
• 3D Pose-Based Temporal Action Segmentation for Figure Skating: A Fine-Grained and Jump Procedure-Aware Annotation Approach
• SoccerNet-Echoes: A Soccer Game Audio Commentary Dataset
• Improving Object Detection Quality in Football Through Super-Resolution Techniques