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

Jan Held, Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Abdullah Hamdi, Bernard Ghanem, Marc Van Droogenbroeck

CVPRW 2023 pp. 5086-5097

doi:10.1109/CVPRW59228.2023.00537 /cvprw/2023/held2023cvprw-vars/

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.

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Cite

Text

Held et al. "VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Views." IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2023. doi:10.1109/CVPRW59228.2023.00537

Markdown

[Held et al. "VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Views." IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2023.](https://mlanthology.org/cvprw/2023/held2023cvprw-vars/) doi:10.1109/CVPRW59228.2023.00537

BibTeX

@inproceedings{held2023cvprw-vars,
  title     = {{VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Views}},
  author    = {Held, Jan and Cioppa, Anthony and Giancola, Silvio and Hamdi, Abdullah and Ghanem, Bernard and Van Droogenbroeck, Marc},
  booktitle = {IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops},
  year      = {2023},
  pages     = {5086-5097},
  doi       = {10.1109/CVPRW59228.2023.00537},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/cvprw/2023/held2023cvprw-vars/}
}