ChyronHego Unveils TRACAB Gen5

ChyronHego has introduced TRACAB Gen5, the newest generation of the company's Emmy® Award-winning TRACAB optical sports tracking system.

TRACAB Gen5 features significant improvements in tracking data quality and accuracy, driven by completely redesigned tracking algorithms, a richer array of camera angles, and powerful new AI features for player, number, and colour recognition.

TRACAB Gen5 uses a distributed system of cameras installed around the field of play and advanced image processing technology to capture and deliver real-time tracking data on the movements of each player, referees, and the ball. As the world's most widely deployed optical sports tracking system, TRACAB has been installed in over 300 stadia and is currently used to capture live tracking data for more than 4,500 football/soccer and baseball games each year.

"TRACAB has always been the most accurate sports tracking system in the world, but with TRACAB Gen5 we've made it exponentially better," said Rickard Öhrn, president, sports, at ChyronHego. "We've overhauled and improved our AI-based image detection tracking algorithms from the ground up to ensure maximum accuracy and the lowest latency. We're combining these advanced algorithms with multiple high-resolution camera angles, which means we can deliver the highest quality data feed on the market — in real-time — and provide an even greater value for leagues, federations and teams, betting companies, broadcasters, and OTT rights holders producing virtual graphics and enhancements for better fan engagement."

TRACAB Gen5 includes an all-new distributed camera architecture in which cameras can be deployed on both sides of the field and behind each goal to capture action from four angles. With the flexibility of the system offering multiple camera views, Gen5 is able to track every object on the field at a much higher resolution. By stitching and utilising these camera views within TRACAB's industry-leading computer vision algorithms, Gen5 is able to deliver the highest accuracy of ball and player tracking data in the global sports market. The accuracy of player identities is further enhanced through TRACAB Gen5's AI capabilities, which enable the system to recognize and distinguish player numbers and jersey colours from any angle. Where preferred by clients, this capability also allows for the removal of operators from on-site operations.

TRACAB Gen5 has, on request by the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL), been independently validated by the Technical University of Munich, which used the Vicon 3D motion capture system to measure the ChyronHego system's tracking and data collection accuracy. This is the industry standard by which tracking solutions are validated in the football market. The testing revealed that TRACAB Gen5 is able to track objects on the field with an average accuracy of 7cm (relative to the centre of mass of a player) and 100% tracking completeness. Coupled with a real-time latency of below 300 milliseconds, these are the highest performance results ever achieved by any sports tracking system in the world.

On the strength of these results, the DFL is currently rolling out TRACAB Gen5 to all 36 of its Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 arenas for the 2019-2020 football season.

The robustness and scalability of this data is key for stakeholders. ChyronHego provides this service through the TRACAB Gateway, an advanced cloud-based, automated delivery engine and database. The TRACAB Gateway provides an open architecture of APIs for real-time and post-match data integration, as well as the querying of data for all stakeholders within leagues, teams, betting clients, and broadcast or OTT media.

Building further on this high level of accuracy and real-time data delivery, ChyronHego is expanding the utility of TRACAB's deep convolutional neural network algorithms even further to deliver limb or skeletal tracking. This is done by identifying players' key body parts, such as heads, shoulders, arms, hips, knees, heels, and toes, to enable the creation of three-dimensional skeletal movements of players. The resulting multidimensional data, accurate enough even to define the position of the tip of a striker's foot, will be fed automatically into VAR (Video Assistant Referee) operations. This will allow offside calling decisions to be powered by instantaneous and automatic identification of situations. Additionally, this unprecedented level of data resolution and quality will be able to power many new stakeholder applications for fan-engagement and professional purposes, placing ChyronHego at the forefront of data innovation in sports.

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