A brand new offside judgment technology will likely be introduced within the English Premier League (EPL), which opens on the seventeenth. As a substitute of the prevailing sensor-based VAR (video assistant referee) technology, it features 3D rendering technology using an iPhone.
The Verge reported on the 14th (local time) that the EPL has signed a contract with Genius Sports and can introduce latest offside decision technology ranging from the 2024-2025 season.
Football leagues have been using the VAR system since 2022, following a FIFA decision. The system uses machine learning-based limb tracking technology and embedded soccer ball sensors.
VAR can track 29 points on a player’s body, however the system has limitations and is usually criticised for causing delays in readings, human error and concerns concerning the accuracy of calls during a match.
The brand new offside detection technology being introduced by Genius Sports known as ‘Semi-Assisted Offside Technology (SAOT)’. It uses plenty of cameras to accurately create 3D renderings of every player.
“We desired to test whether we could effectively implement the technology on existing mobile phones, away from very expensive 4K cameras,” said Matt Fleckenstein, chief product officer at Genius, explaining that the corporate ended up using an iPhone, which is familiar to software company employees.
“The secret is to deploy 24 to twenty-eight iPhones, specifically the ‘iPhone 15 Pro’, to evenly cover the sphere and the sidelines,” he said. Typically, two phones are deployed in pairs at the identical time, angled barely in another way to cover the world.
The iPhones placed within the stadium in this manner provide 7,000 to 10,000 data points, making a 3D virtual mesh for every player. The reason is that with this many data points, some missing information as a result of lighting issues, etc. may be covered.
As well as, recent phones, including the iPhone, can record at very high frame rates. Typically, they record at 100 frames per second, and in our tests, they were capable of record at as much as 200 frames. The iPhone 15 Pro also offers some local computer vision processing capabilities. All data is distributed to an on-premise server and processed in a system called ‘GeniusIQ’.
GeniusIQ’s computer vision and prediction algorithms can discover individual fingers of a player, and even predict their exact location once they are obscured from view. The corporate has trained its system on soccer matches for several seasons to realize this.
Ultimately, the reason is that by capturing more frames, it is feasible to find out the precise positions of players and the ball in the meanwhile an offside decision is made.
While avoiding a direct comparison, the corporate noted that other VAR systems “only use 30 or 40 points on the body, giving a rough stick figure of the player”, which it called “skeletal tracking”.
He also explained that a much less sophisticated method, called the ‘Center of Mass’ method, is used, where the player is represented by only a single dot.
Nevertheless, Genius explains that it’s able to way more sophisticated judgment by forming a ‘semantic mesh object’ with 10,000 data points.
It’s unclear whether the technology will likely be introduced from the opening game. Genius said it can be fully implemented within the EPL by the tip of the yr and used until the tip of the season.
Reporter Im Dae-jun ydj@aitimes.com
