mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Views

arXiv 2304.04617 ↗First posted 10 Apr 2023cs.CVcited by 38

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 39 of its 83 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2023.

Builds on

39 of 83 references.

References · 39

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 52,096
  2. 2017The Kinetics Human Action Video Datasetcited by 1,909
  3. 2018SlowFast Networks for Video Recognitioncited by 1,867
  4. 2017A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognitioncited by 1,143
  5. 2014Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videoscited by 1,068
  6. 2016Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognitioncited by 902
  7. 2021Multiscale Vision Transformerscited by 897
  8. 2017Dense-Captioning Events in Videoscited by 793
  9. 2015Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognitioncited by 565
  10. 2019NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understandingcited by 533
  11. 2021MViTv2: Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detectioncited by 519
  12. 2016YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmarkcited by 324
27 more
  1. 2017Temporal Segment Networks for Action Recognition in Videoscited by 279
  2. 2015Beyond Short Snippets: Deep Networks for Video Classificationcited by 233
  3. 2017Video Generation From Textcited by 154
  4. 2018SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videoscited by 150
  5. 2020MVTN: Multi-View Transformation Network for 3D Shape Recognitioncited by 140
  6. 2014Cross-view Action Modeling, Learning and Recognitioncited by 134
  7. 2020SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videoscited by 131
  8. 2018Actions Speak Louder Than Goals: Valuing Player Actions in Soccercited by 90
  9. 2022SoccerNet-Tracking: Multiple Object Tracking Dataset and Benchmark in Soccer Videoscited by 80
  10. 2022Body Part-Based Representation Learning for Occluded Person Re-Identificationcited by 64
  11. 2019A Context-Aware Loss Function for Action Spotting in Soccer Videoscited by 56
  12. 2017Video Captioning via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learningcited by 47
  13. 2019Equivariant Multi-View Networkscited by 45
  14. 2022Spotting Temporally Precise, Fine-Grained Events in Videocited by 40
  15. 2022DeepSportradar-v1: Computer Vision Dataset for Sports Understanding with High Quality Annotationscited by 37
  16. 2018Unsupervised Learning of View-invariant Action Representationscited by 32
  17. 2022A Survey on Video Action Recognition in Sports: Datasets, Methods and Applicationscited by 28
  18. 2022SoccerNet 2022 Challenges Resultscited by 28
  19. 2014Histogram of Oriented Principal Components for Cross-View Action Recognitioncited by 27
  20. 2022Temporally Precise Action Spotting in Soccer Videos Using Dense Detection Anchorscited by 27
  21. 2022Semi-Supervised Training to Improve Player and Ball Detection in Soccercited by 25
  22. 2020Using Player's Body-Orientation to Model Pass Feasibility in Soccercited by 20
  23. 2022Efficient tracking of team sport players with few game-specific annotationscited by 17
  24. 2022Action Spotting using Dense Detection Anchors Revisited: Submission to the SoccerNet Challenge 2022cited by 14
  25. 2020Multimodal and multiview distillation for real-time player detection on a football fieldcited by 12
  26. 2022A Graph-Based Method for Soccer Action Spotting Using Unsupervised Player Classificationcited by 10
  27. 2022MVTN: Learning Multi-View Transformations for 3D Understandingcited by 7

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 16; 2025: 12; 2026: 9.

38 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024MatchTime: Towards Automatic Soccer Game Commentary Generationcited by 37
  2. 2024SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction: End-to-End Athlete Tracking and Identification on a Minimapcited by 34
  3. 2024SPORTU: A Comprehensive Sports Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 24
  4. 2024X-VARS: Introducing Explainability in Football Refereeing with Multi-Modal Large Language Modelcited by 22
  5. 2024Towards Universal Soccer Video Understandingcited by 21
  6. 2023SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Resultscited by 20
  7. 2024AutoSoccerPose: Automated 3D posture Analysis of Soccer Shot Movementscited by 15
  8. 2024A Universal Protocol to Benchmark Camera Calibration for Sportscited by 14
  9. 2024Multi-task Learning for Joint Re-identification, Team Affiliation, and Role Classification for Sports Visual Trackingcited by 13
  10. 2024SoccerNet-Echoes: A Soccer Game Audio Commentary Datasetcited by 12
  11. 2025SoccerMaster: A Vision Foundation Model for Soccer Understandingcited by 10
  12. 2025Action Anticipation from SoccerNet Football Video Broadcastscited by 9
26 more
  1. 2024Towards AI-Powered Video Assistant Referee System (VARS) for Association Footballcited by 8
  2. 2024SoccerNet 2024 Challenges Resultscited by 8
  3. 2024Foul prediction with estimated poses from soccer broadcast videocited by 7
  4. 20243D Pose-Based Temporal Action Segmentation for Figure Skating: A Fine-Grained and Jump Procedure-Aware Annotation Approachcited by 7
  5. 2024Deep learning for action spotting in association football videoscited by 7
  6. 2025Domain Adaptation of VLM for Soccer Video Understandingcited by 7
  7. 2025UKBOB: One Billion MRI Labeled Masks for Generalizable 3D Medical Image Segmentationcited by 4
  8. 2025SoccerNet-v3D: Leveraging Sports Broadcast Replays for 3D Scene Understandingcited by 4
  9. 2025SoccerNet 2025 Challenges Resultscited by 4
  10. 2025SV3.3B: A Sports Video Understanding Model for Action Recognitioncited by 3
  11. 2024OSL-ActionSpotting: A Unified Library for Action Spotting in Sports Videoscited by 2
  12. 2025Action Valuation in Sports: A Surveycited by 2
  13. 2025Can Geometry Save Central Views for Sports Field Registration?cited by 2
  14. 2024Investigating Event-Based Cameras for Video Frame Interpolation in Sportscited by 1
  15. 2025Multi Camera Connected Vision System with Multi View Analytics: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 1
  16. 2026Towards Athlete Fatigue Assessment from Association Football Videoscited by 1
  17. 2026RefereeBench: Are Video MLLMs Ready to be Multi-Sport Refereescited by 1
  18. 2026SoccerLens: Grounded Soccer Video Understanding Beyond Accuracycited by 1
  19. 2026SoccerNet 2026 Challenges Resultscited by 1
  20. 2025AquaMonitor: A multimodal multi-view image sequence dataset for real-life aquatic invertebrate biodiversity monitoringcited by 0
  21. 2025VIFSS: View-Invariant and Figure Skating-Specific Pose Representation Learning for Temporal Action Segmentationcited by 0
  22. 2026SoccerRef-Agents: Multi-Agent System for Automated Soccer Refereeingcited by 0
  23. 2026TreeSoc: Tree-Structured Dynamic Reasoning and Tool Synergy for Soccer Video Understandingcited by 0
  24. 2026BasketEvent: Understanding Who Did What and When in Basketball Videoscited by 0
  25. 2026A Survey of Large Models in Sportscited by 0
  26. 2026CAS-FD: Contact-Aware Temporal Sampling for Single-View Foul vs Dive Recognitioncited by 0