In recent years, high-tech cameras have proliferated in the highest levels of basketball. Let’s try to understand these initiatives and analyse the changes brought about by these new artificial intelligence technologies.
It all started in 2010 with the sports company StatsPerform (this name is now present on all NBA games), which installed the first SportVU camera systems in NBA stadiums.
The cameras were at the time perched in the air following not only the action of the game, but also the movements of the players. In just 3 years, in 2013, these cameras had arrived in all NBA arenas.
How Does It Work?
The cameras keep a digitised visual record of each match, collecting much more information than is possible with simple analysis on video capture and observation or even annotation.
They don’t just track who scores a basket, for example, but they also capture each player’s position and speed, and whether the score is from a built play or a quick break.
With so much data, the challenge is to extract useful patterns to help players and coaches acquire the best movement and tactics possible.
First Artificial Intelligence Initiatives
At the beginning of the 2010s, a dozen franchises had offered themselves the services of SportVU.
They then took the opportunity to switch to a real-time analysis system, giving them an undeniable advantage over their opponents, since they had access to advanced statistics during matches and after matches.
All NBA teams and sports companies have converged on the same powerful tools: machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Combined with an unprecedented flood of data, these techniques reveal new insights into individual players, teams and their opponents, promising to change the way pros play basketball and how fans watch it.
At the same time, another company came up with a similar use with the NOAH sensor which records the action on the pitch from a perch above the basket.
It was the first initiative to no longer analyse the statistics but the overall movements of a team by capturing all the players and all the movements on the ground.
