VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Views
This addresses the lack of affordable and accessible refereeing technology for soccer leagues beyond professional levels, potentially improving fairness and accuracy across all federation levels.
The paper tackles the problem of automating soccer decision-making by proposing VARS, a Video Assistant Referee System that uses multi-view video analysis to provide real-time feedback to referees, validated on a new dataset called SoccerNet-MVFoul with annotations from a professional referee.
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.