Spatio-Temporal Data Analysis on In-Memory Column Stores

In recent years the use of spatio-temporal data increased strongly in various areas. Especially in the highly competitive sports sector new insights gained by positional information of players – tracked by camera or sensor based systems during a game – can have a major impact on the training and tactic of a team.  In contrast to current applications, which focus solely on the analysis and visualization of basic metrics like the run distance or the average position of a player, the interactive tactic board enables the analysis of complex tactical patterns. For coaches and video analysts the analysis of game recordings is an important step during the preparation and post-processing of games. They extract strength and weaknesses of their teams as well as opponents by manually analyzing the video recordings of past games. Since video recordings are an unstructured data source, it is a complex and time intensive task to find specific game situations or similar patterns in the recordings.

With this prototype we present a novel approach to detect patterns based on spatial data. Such patterns could be the built up of the central defenders or the shifting of the side. The application uses the metaphor of a tactic board to offer a graphical query language for video recordings. With this interactive tactic board the user can model a game situation for which all matching occurrences are immediately displayed. The interactive analysis of these huge amounts of positional data is enabled by the usage of a columnar in-memory database and specifically optimized algorithms. A user can directly jump to the respective timestamp in the recordings of the corresponding game situation. Additionally to the video a radar map based on the spatial data is displayed to give an overview of the specific situation. While the current prototype focuses on the analysis of soccer games, the described concepts can easily adopted for other sports. Especially team sports like football or basketball are well suited. On top of analyzing offensive and defensive behavior of the own team over several games in an intuitive, efficient and fast way, the application can also be used to outline specific strength and weaknesses of opposing teams or individual players during the game preparation phase. With the capabilities to find specific game situations and complex patterns in video recordings, the interactive tactic board serves as an effective tool to improve the preparation and post-processing of sport games.