mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Towards AI-Powered Video Assistant Referee System (VARS) for Association Football

arXiv 2407.12483 ↗First posted 17 Jul 2024cs.CVcited by 8

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Abstract (arXiv)

Over the past decade, the technology used by referees in football has improved substantially, enhancing the fairness and accuracy of decisions. This progress has culminated in the implementation of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR), an innovation that enables backstage referees to review incidents on the pitch from multiple points of view. However, the VAR is currently limited to professional leagues due to its expensive infrastructure and the lack of referees worldwide. In this paper, we present the semi-automated Video Assistant Referee System (VARS) that leverages the latest findings in multi-view video analysis. VARS sets a new state-of-the-art on the SoccerNet-MVFoul dataset, a multi-view video dataset of football fouls. Our VARS achieves a new state-of-the-art on the SoccerNet-MVFoul dataset by recognizing the type of foul in 50% of instances and the appropriate sanction in 46% of cases. Finally, we conducted a comparative study to investigate human performance in classifying fouls and their corresponding severity and compared these findings to our VARS. The results of our study highlight the potential of our VARS to reach human performance and support football refereeing across all levels of professional and amateur federations.

Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 28 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2024.

Builds on

28 of 52 references.

References · 28

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2017The Kinetics Human Action Video Datasetcited by 1,909
  3. 2021Multiscale Vision Transformerscited by 897
  4. 2015Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognitioncited by 565
  5. 2021MViTv2: Improved Multiscale Vision Transformers for Classification and Detectioncited by 519
  6. 2018SoccerNet: A Scalable Dataset for Action Spotting in Soccer Videoscited by 150
  7. 2020SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videoscited by 131
  8. 2022SoccerNet-Tracking: Multiple Object Tracking Dataset and Benchmark in Soccer Videoscited by 80
  9. 2019Jointly Learning to Align and Translate with Transformer Modelscited by 75
  10. 2022Body Part-Based Representation Learning for Occluded Person Re-Identificationcited by 64
  11. 2023SoccerNet-Caption: Dense Video Captioning for Soccer Broadcasts Commentariescited by 57
  12. 2019A Context-Aware Loss Function for Action Spotting in Soccer Videoscited by 56
16 more
  1. 2022Spotting Temporally Precise, Fine-Grained Events in Videocited by 40
  2. 2023VARS: Video Assistant Referee System for Automated Soccer Decision Making from Multiple Viewscited by 38
  3. 2022DeepSportradar-v1: Computer Vision Dataset for Sports Understanding with High Quality Annotationscited by 37
  4. 2024SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction: End-to-End Athlete Tracking and Identification on a Minimapcited by 34
  5. 2021Temporally-Aware Feature Pooling for Action Spotting in Soccer Broadcastscited by 30
  6. 2022Temporally Precise Action Spotting in Soccer Videos Using Dense Detection Anchorscited by 27
  7. 2022Semi-Supervised Training to Improve Player and Ball Detection in Soccercited by 25
  8. 2024X-VARS: Introducing Explainability in Football Refereeing with Multi-Modal Large Language Modelcited by 22
  9. 2020Using Player's Body-Orientation to Model Pass Feasibility in Soccercited by 20
  10. 2022Efficient tracking of team sport players with few game-specific annotationscited by 17
  11. 2022Action Spotting using Dense Detection Anchors Revisited: Submission to the SoccerNet Challenge 2022cited by 14
  12. 2023Towards Active Learning for Action Spotting in Association Football Videoscited by 14
  13. 2024A Universal Protocol to Benchmark Camera Calibration for Sportscited by 14
  14. 2020Multimodal and multiview distillation for real-time player detection on a football fieldcited by 12
  15. 2024SoccerNet-Echoes: A Soccer Game Audio Commentary Datasetcited by 12
  16. 2022MMSys'22 Grand Challenge on AI-based Video Production for Soccercited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 2; 2026: 3.

8 papers.

  1. 2024SPORTU: A Comprehensive Sports Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 24
  2. 2024SoccerNet 2024 Challenges Resultscited by 8
  3. 2024Deep learning for action spotting in association football videoscited by 7
  4. 2025SoccerNet 2025 Challenges Resultscited by 4
  5. 2025ProfVLM: A lightweight video-language model for multi-view proficiency estimationcited by 4
  6. 2026Towards Athlete Fatigue Assessment from Association Football Videoscited by 1
  7. 2026SoccerNet 2026 Challenges Resultscited by 1
  8. 2026CAS-FD: Contact-Aware Temporal Sampling for Single-View Foul vs Dive Recognitioncited by 0