Wide Open Gazes: Quantifying Visual Exploratory Behavior in Soccer with Pose Enhanced Positional Data

Sport analysis is crucial for team performance since it provides actionable data that can inform coaching decisions, improve player performance, and enhance team strategies. To analyze more complex features from game footage, a computer vision model can be used to identify and track key entities from the field. We propose the use of an object detection and tracking system to predict player positioning throughout the game. To translate this to positioning in relation to the field dimensions, we use a point prediction model to identify key points on the field and combine these with known field dimensions to extract actual distances. For the player-identification model, object detection models like YOLO and Faster R-CNN are evaluated on the accuracy of our custom video footage using multiple different evaluation metrics. The goal is to identify the best model for object identification to obtain the most accurate results when paired with SAM2 (Segment Anything Model 2) for segmentation and tracking. For the key point detection model, we use a CNN model to find consistent locations in the soccer field. Through homography, the positions of points and objects in the camera perspective will be transformed to a real-ground perspective. The segmented player masks from SAM2 are transformed from camera perspective to real-world field coordinates through homography, regardless of camera angle or movement. The transformed real-world coordinates can be used to calculate valuable tactical insights including player speed, distance covered, positioning heatmaps, and more complex team statistics, providing coaches and players with actionable performance data previously unavailable from standard video analysis.

Velocity-aware pitch control is standard, but under a broadcast viewport half the players are off screen and on-screen velocities come from a drifting calibration. We ask at which layer of broadcast off-ball analysis velocity changes the answer. Inheriting our off-screen imputation protocol (three Metrica matches, 44 m viewport, block-bootstrap CIs), we score four velocity regimes -- none, viewport-legal observed, true-for-visible, true-for-all -- against a velocity-aware ground truth at three layers: imputation, the control surface, and team verdicts. Velocity is nearly useless for imputation (-0.2 pp against a 12--14 pp velocity-free surface MAE), first-order for the surface (-1.5 to -1.8 pp, 11--15% of that MAE), and ten times smaller for verdicts (-0.12 to -0.19 pp). The velocity that matters is the visible channel: perfect occluded-player velocity adds 2--6% of the visible gain, and no last-seen decay policy we tested exceeds that. Omitting velocity blurs the surface (per-frame |e| 2.2--2.6 pp) with small time-averaged bias (per cell <=0.4 pp), whereas imputation error is a structured bias against the defending team's deep zone (5--9 pp). At a fixed velocity window, a noise ladder of eleven jitter settings, including sigma_v-matched pairs, is ordered to first order by one velocity-noise axis sigma_v with break-even ~1 m/s; eleven SoccerNet-GSR clips from one match through our pipeline measure sigma_v=1.65 m/s yet recover 24--36% of the benefit: 43% of the variance is frame-common, which the surface tolerates, and the residual is heavy-tailed and clustered, which Gaussian controls matched on component RMS do not reproduce (+0.03 vs. +0.36). The share of velocity-free error that velocity removes grows with viewport width (7% at 36 m, 21% at 60 m): fix imputation on tight shots, velocity on wide ones. Code and logs are released.

Soccer analytics draws on two kinds of information: spatio-temporal data describing where players and the ball are, and event data describing what they do. Public datasets offer them apart, or together only on broadcast footage that leaves players outside the frame unobserved. SoccerTrack v2 combines continuous full-pitch video, long player trajectories and actor-linked events in one resource: ten university-level matches, 932 minutes of fixed-camera 4K panoramic video, annotated per frame with metric pitch coordinates, jersey numbers and persistent identities, roles and team sides for all players, and with ball action events in twelve classes, linked to the acting players through the same identifiers used in the trajectories. We fix a match-level split and report baselines for two tasks. For game state reconstruction, we run a full pipeline over all twenty halves and find that GS-HOTA scores degrade as sequence length increases. For ball action spotting, we train a model on the player trajectories, with and without the ball track. The data, the split and the evaluation tooling are released so that both tasks can be developed and compared at match length on the same footage.