The Institute for Exercise Training and Sports Informatics and the L3S Research Center at the Leibniz University Hannover have successfully aquired a project funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The MM4Sports project is a transfer project in the field of sports data analysis, using data from soccer, basketball and handball. The project was accepted under the funding line “Application of Artificial Intelligence Methods in Practice” and will be funded with more than 800.000 euros over a two-year project period (2020-2022). With this funding line, the BMBF supports projects that aim to transfer innovative research results from the field of artificial intelligence into practice.
Another project partner is the Munich-based technology company KINEXON, an expert in the field of real-time collection and processing of sports performance data, with which the Institute of Exercise Training and Sports Informatics has been collaborating for two years. As part of this cooperation, the institute is one of the few research sites in the world where position data can be collected in indoor and outdoor game sports. “Based on the existing position data solution of KINEXON, an automated merging of position and video data in sports games is missing so far, which is important for basic and application-oriented research projects in the field of the future market Sports Analytics,” holds Univ.-Prof. Dr. Daniel Memmert, managing director of the Institute of Training Science and Sports Informatics at the German Sport University Cologne. He and his team have been working for years on the analysis (e.g. with SOCCER©) and simulation of complex position data (so-called Big Data) and have developed and validated theoretical framework models for this (cf. DFG project “e-Science”).
The goal of the new project is now to integrate machine learning methods into KINEXON’s existing analysis platform, he said. “At the heart of our solutions is our in-house sensor network for collecting accurate and reliable live data in indoor and outdoor environments. In the future, we want to push more strongly for the integration of additional data sources in real time and further develop the automatic translation of data into sound analyses and recommendations for action”, says Dr. Maximilian Schmidt, CEO of KINEXON Sports & Media.
The expertise in handling video data and information in the age of the Internet and digitalization comes to the project from the L3S research center, located at Leibniz University in Hannover. Here, computer scientist Prof. Dr. Ralph Ewerth and his “Visual Analytics” research group have been working for many years on the analysis of videos and data that are available in multiple modalities (e.g., speech and images) or have been captured with different sensors (multimodal data). Among other things, the group researches and develops methods of automatic video analysis and artificial vision in conjunction with machine learning techniques. “The automatic enhancement and visualization of position and video data as well as their analysis by machine learning methods supports sports analysts in the preparation of important sports-relevant questions about team and individual tactics. This can increase the success of teams in high-performance sports,” says Prof. Ewerth, outlining the area of application.