Establishment Of A Global Standard For Athlete Tracking System Accuracy
Translating practical research solutions to impact sports globally
With the return to FIFA World Cup qualifiers on the horizon, it felt time to give a more detailed look at the series of projects which Victoria University and TRACK were commissioned to do by FIFA.
The project was designed to create a transparent overview of the different accuracies of various electronic performance tracking systems, in order to create minimum standards for athlete tracking technologies. Identifying what systems are out there, what accuracies these systems have and being transparent about the findings was important for both global football stakeholders, as well as FIFA’s invested interest as a tournament organiser.
Victoria University and TRACK were chosen by FIFA to conduct these projects as we “offered a practical research approach” and are “one of the few universities in the world which are capable of conducting a research project of this scale”.
The work took place over two phases. The first phase of this project was conducted in Australia at Melbourne’s Docklands Stadium.
To establish how well each of these manufacturers systems work, a computer vision model was set up to ascertain the precise location of all players on the soccer pitch throughout the matches.
Check out this short clip from Victoria University on Phase One of the project..
The second phase of this project was conducted in Spain at FC Barcelona’s Mini Estadi.
Rather than using a computer vision model to assess the precise location of players on the soccer pitch for comparisons, TRACK set up one of the largest outdoor VICON capture areas ever constructed. This included 36 cameras spanning a 30m x 30m test area.
Check out this short clip from FIFATV on Phase Two of the project.
From these projects, TRACK was then able to compare the level of agreement between manufacturer data and both VICON and our own computer vision solution. FIFA have since released validation reports on these tracking systems, which includes some of the most popular systems used in global sport. If you’re intrigued, or if you’re using electronic performance tracking systems data for commercial purposes or research, but think the system you're using hasn't been validated, you can check out the validation reports on the FIFA.com website.
Interested in more details about these projects?