Research and Development of Video Analysis System for Game Analysis of Volleyball

In Japan, policies have been positively promoted aiming at securing sport opportunities for every citizen, realization of a society of health and longevity, regional vitalization through sports, and improvement in athletic ability at sports towards the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, with Japan Sports Agency as a flag-bearer. Among others, an effort of grasping the ability of athletes or game analysis using the state-of-the-art sensors or wearable terminals is one of the important policies of Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which attracts high attention. Japan women's national volleyball team achieved magnificent results such as winning a medal in the Olympics by utilizing tablet terminals and the game analysis software in selecting the members for the world championships or commands during the games. However, to apply ICT to the sport area, it is necessary to get hold of not only personnel who have knowledge about handling sensor equipment and expert knowledge of the game but also excellent data analysts. Therefore, application of ICT to sports is limited to part of professional sports. Its introduction into amateur sports faces a mountain of problems. In this study, with focus on volleyball, which is an indoor sport, we make research on the trends of studies on game analysis, and propose a system for supporting decision making of games by recognizing multiple athletes and balls from the images of games shot with video cameras using deep learning. We confirmed that it is possible to generate analysis codes for inputting on Data Volley with proposed method. Data Volley is used by national teams all over the world and college sports.