Team behavior analysis in sports using the Poisson equation

We propose a novel physics-based model for analysing team players´ positions and movements on a sports playing field. The goal is to detect for each frame the region with the highest population of a given team´s players and the region towards which the team is moving as they press for territorial advancement, termed the region of intent. Given the positions of team players from a plan view of the playing field at any given time, we solve a particular Poisson equation to generate a smooth distribution. The proposed distribution provides the likelihood of a point to be occupied by players so that more highly populated regions can be detected by appropriate thresholding. Computing the proposed distribution for each frame provides a sequence of distributions, which we process to detect the region of intent at any time during the game. Our model is evaluated on a field hockey dataset, and results show that the proposed approach can provide effective features that could be used to generate team statistics useful for performance evaluation or broadcasting purposes.