This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Abstract-Analysts in professional team sport regularly perform analysis to gain strategic and tactical insights into player and team behavior. Goals of team sport analysis regularly include identification of weaknesses of opposing teams, or assessing performance and improvement potential of a coached team. Current analysis workflows are typically based on the analysis of team videos. Also, analysts can rely on techniques from Information Visualization, to depict e.g., player or ball trajectories. However, video analysis is typically a time-consuming process, where the analyst needs to memorize and annotate scenes. In contrast, visualization typically relies on an abstract data model, often using abstract visual mappings, and is not directly linked to the observed movement context anymore. We propose a visual analytics system that tightly integrates team sport video recordings with abstract visualization of underlying trajectory data. We apply appropriate computer vision techniques to extract trajectory data from video input. Furthermore, we apply advanced trajectory and movement analysis techniques to derive relevant team sport analytic measures for region, event and player analysis in the case of soccer analysis. Our system seamlessly integrates video and visualization modalities, enabling analysts to draw on the advantages of both analysis forms. Several expert studies conducted with team sport analysts indicate the effectiveness of our integrated approach. Permanent repository link

No abstract

The analysis of invasive team sports often concentrates on cooperative and competitive aspects of collective movement behavior. A main goal is the identification and explanation of strategies, and eventually the development of new strategies. In visual sports analytics, a range of different visual-interactive analysis techniques have been proposed, e.g., based on visualization using for example trajectories, graphs, heatmaps, and animations. Identifying suitable visualizations for a specific situation is key to a successful analysis. Existing systems enable the interactive selection of different visualization facets to support the analysis process. However, an interactive selection of appropriate visualizations is a difficult, complex, and timeconsuming task. In this paper, we propose a four-step analytics conceptual workflow for an automatic selection of appropriate views for key situations in soccer games. Our concept covers classification, specification, explanation, and alteration of match situations, effectively enabling the analysts to focus on important game situations and the determination of alternative moves. Combining abstract visualizations with real world video recordings by Immersive Visual Analytics and descriptive storylines, we support domain experts in understanding key situations. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed conceptual workflow via two proofs of concept and evaluate our system by comparing our results to manual video annotations by domain experts. Initial expert feedback shows that our proposed concept improves the understanding of competitive sports and leads to a more efficient data analysis.

No abstract

Visual data exploration is a useful means to extract relevant information from large sets of data. The visual analytics pipeline processes data recorded from the real world to extract knowledge from gathered data. Subsequently, the resulting knowledge is associated with the real world and applied to it. However, the considered data for the analysis is usually only a small fraction of the actual real-world data and lacks above all in context information. It can easily happen that crucial context information is disregarded, leading to false conclusions about the real world. Therefore, conclusions and reasoning based on the analysis of this data pertain to the world represented by the data, and may not be valid for the real world. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness of this discrepancy between the data world and the real world which has a high impact on the validity of analysis results in the real world. We propose two strategies which help to identify and remove specific differences between the data world and the real world. The usefulness and applicability of our strategies are demonstrated via several use cases.