Continuous football player tracking from discrete broadcast data
Matthew J. Penn Christl A. Donnelly Samir Bhatt
Player tracking data remains out of reach for many professional football
teams as their video feeds are not sufficiently high quality for computer
vision technologies to be used. To help bridge this gap, we present a method
that can estimate continuous full-pitch tracking data from discrete data made
from broadcast footage. Such data could be collected by clubs or players at a
similar cost to event data, which is widely available down to semi-professional
level. We test our method using open-source tracking data, and include a
version that can be applied to a large set of over 200 games with such discrete
data.