Independent University of Munich and DFL tests endorse accuracy of ChyronHego TRACAB

ChyronHego has announced that its TRACAB Optical Tracking System achieved the highest accuracy results of any comparable system based upon scientific tests conducted by the Technical University of Munich.

The tests, commissioned jointly by ChyronHego and the DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga (German Football League), were designed to measure the accuracy of the systems for collecting data during play — a capability that has implications for physical and tactical coaching, as well as for broadcast, digital media, and more. The results provide independent validation of TRACAB’s accuracy in capturing sports data, and also give ChyronHego valuable information it can use to further improve upon the current system and refine the next generation of TRACAB.

The tests involved two ChyronHego tracking technologies. In addition to the TRACAB optical tracking system, the tests also included the wearable ZXY Arena system, which is local positioning system (LPS) tracking that uses radio waves to determine position. As a ground truth of reference, the researchers measured the ChyronHego tracking systems against a motion capture technology called Vicon, considered by many researchers to provide an unmatched gold standard with unsurpassed measurement accuracy levels of mere millimeters.

The tests took place at Düsseldorf’s Merkur Spiel-Arena, home to one of the German Bundesliga’s football teams. Players were tasked to run around the football pitch performing designated movements such as lunging, accelerating, decelerating, changing direction, and so forth.

The researchers carefully constructed the test to ensure it included all of the kinds of movements that would typically take place in a real game so that the football industry would view the results as being representative of the real world.

During the tests, players were tracked using the TRACAB patented real-time image-processing technology and also with unique radio frequency ZXY tags mounted on their clothing. The result was that data could be captured simultaneously from both technologies within these tests and then be compared independently with Vicon, the gold standard. The tests also enabled comparison of data from each system to help achieve even closer consistency between the datasets.

Extensive examination and analysis of the test results showed that both ChyronHego systems performed extremely well and achieved very high accuracy levels. Moreover, the Technical University of Munich concluded that TRACAB was by far the most accurate tracking system of all optical and wearable technologies that the researchers have tested so far, including many other well-known systems, and that the ChyronHego systems exceeded the performance of certain technologies considered to be gold standards.

“It has been of great importance for us within the Bundesliga to constantly push the boundaries of accuracy and quality of data from our player performance tracking technologies,” said Hendrik Weber, managing director at Sportec Solutions, a DFL subsidiary. “This is crucial to ensure that the growing number of applications that rely on this data, in both the professional and media spaces, can be confident in the resultant statistics and analytics that are derived from this data.

“We therefore needed to get an independent validation performed by a highly respected research organization, like the Technical University of Munich, to provide us with an objective assessment of how the current technology performs.”